Senator Udo Udoma, the Minister of Budget and National Planning has said that the government has put plans in place to offset the capital budget deficit of N1.4 trillion. According to him, the government has met the recurrent expenditure and debt management expenses as specified in the budget, leaving only the N1.4 trillion shortfall on capital expenditure.
“As far as the recurrent is concerned, the 2016 budget has been virtually fully implemented. The emoluments have been paid in full. We’ve released all the money. At the federal level, all salaries have been released. We have met that in full… We have also met all debt service in full. With regards to overheads, we have not met that in full but we are almost there. The problem has been capital. In the capital budget, we planned to spend about N1.8 trillion, but we’ve only spent about N400 billion.” ThisDay quotes him as saying.
In order to fund the shortfall, Senator Udoma said that the FG is looking to boost revenue generation by attacking two main fronts- first, improving oil production and secondly, looking at assets sales, concession, and getting advance payments from licensing rounds. He cited the example of the $2 billion General Electric is about to input into the concession of the Lagos-Kano and Port-Harcourt-Maiduguri rail lines.
He also said that the Emergency Spending bill was meant to speed things up with regard to arrangements such as the concessionaire so that the FG can quickly assess funds required for capital expenditure.
Parts of this article originally appeared in ThisDay Newspapers
