The Senate, Thursday, lampooned the Federal Government over what it described as the poor implementation of the 2018 budget, noting that Nigerians were not feeling the impact of government because of the failure of the executive to adequately fund the budget.
The Senate also blamed the government for not releasing adequate funds that would enable the federal agencies to execute developmental projects.
Speaking to Journalists Thursday, in Abuja shortly after the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed appeared before the Senate Committee Chairman on Information, Senator Suleiman Adokwe (PDP, Nasarawa South), said: Before the budget defence exercise, we have done a bit of oversight functions and we noticed that releases for capital projects were quite low. Most of the agencies that we visited received between 10 and 15 per cent releases.
“Based on our interactions with the various agencies of government, we have discovered that capital releases are still very low. So far, the highest I have seen, the highest release is 67 per cent.
“Releases to some agencies are hovering between 40 and 45 per cent. So, the 2018 budget implementation, in our opinion is not very encouraging and capital releases are what really ginger the economy.
“This is because it is the expenditure arising from capital provisions that put money in the system and this has been very low. Only salaries have been paid up to 100 per cent.
“Overhead releases have not been up to 60 per cent in many cases and even most agencies received just for six months for the 2018 financial year which is not good enough.
“If you look at the 2018 total budget of N9 trillion, it sounds like a big money until you do a quick conversion in dollars, than you will discover that it is actually about $25 billion.”
Senator Adokwe who noted that the money was small for a country like Nigeria with over 200 million people, said that Nigerians are not feeling the impact of government because of the failure of the executive to adequately fund the budget, just as he urged the executive to release all the funds that would be appropriated for the various federal ministries, departments and agencies, if it want Nigerians to feel the impact of government.
He queried, “The revenue being generated yearly by the Federal Inland Revenue Service, the Nigerian Customs Service and other collection agencies are even higher than what we are talking about, so why are we experiencing poor releases?”
Meanwhile, the Information Minister during his presentation before the committee said that 2018 budget implementation performance of the ministry was about 67 percent which was better than that of 2017, appealing to the committee to ensure appropriation of the entire N6.121billion budgetary allocations proposed for the ministry for the 2019 fiscal year.
