Senate on Thursday decried the poor implementation of 2018 budget and blamed the executive arm of government for not releasing adequate funds that could enable federal agencies to execute developmental projects.
The Chairman, Senate Committee on Information, Suleiman Adokwe (PDP Nasarawa South) , stated this while addressing journalists shortly after the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, defended his ministry’s 2019 budget before the panel.
He 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 N9trn, it sounds like a big money until when you do a quick conversion in dollars that you will discover that it is actually about $25bn.”
He said the money was small for a country like Nigeria with over 200 million people.
He said Nigerians are not feeling the impact of government because of the failure of the executive to adequately fund the budget.
The senator advised 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.
“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?”, he queried .
However the Information Minister during his presentation before the committee said 2018 budget implementation performance of the ministry is about 67% which according to him, better than that of 2017.
He appealed to the committee to ensure appropriation of the entire N6.121billion budgetary allocations proposed for the ministry in the 2019 fiscal year .
