By Disun Amosun
The DG, Budget Office of the Federation, Ben Akabueze at the ongoing Induction of new and returning lawmakers of the 10th National Assembly has warned them not to see Nigeria as an oil-rich economy and that the earlier they realize this fact, the better for the economic survival of the nation.
In a technical paper presented on the occasion in Abuja, Akabueze said with Nigeria’s over 200 million estimated population figure and currently pumping 1.9 million barrels of crude per day, Nigeria is more of a potentially rich economy.
The DG Budget office urged leaders and peoples Representatives to resist the temptation of believing otherwise and let it be at the back of their minds in the pursuit of their legislative duties.
Ben Akabueze impressed on the country’s leaders, including lawmakers, the need to re-engineer Nigeria Development Plans and Annual Budgets by making both important documents implementable, adding that any plan that cannot speak to implementation is not a good plan, a development he said had been with the country since the Development Plans in Nigeria dating back to the early 90s.
He submitted that annual budgets are essentially back sizes of development plans and contain achievable objectives within a year, adding that a budget that seats outside the development plan is not a good budget.
“For us to be able to fix the infrastructural needs of the country, we need to be spending about 100 billion dollars annually as a country, including private spending on infrastructure. The aggregate budget of the Federal government is only about 30 billion dollars and the aggregate of the states and FCT budget don’t even add up to the federal budget. This means that even if we spend every thing, we will still be left with a huge infrastructural deficit.
“Each country has to determine its budget system that works for it. Budget is multi dimensional in coverage. One, it is political because it allocate scarce resources of the country among multiple competing interests, It is also an economic document because it help as the primary fiscal instrument for stimulating economic growth, ensuring employment and maintaining economic stability. It is an accounting document and provides a ceilings a d is legally binding for government to operate. It is also a moral.document. You can know what a country cherishes by looking at its budget document”, he added.
The Budget Office boss then implored the 10th Assembly lawmakers to intensify on completing works by the the outgoing 9th Assembly to introduce an organic budget law, without which he said the monetary bill will be difficult to implement and tracked.
He warned members to be weary against indiscriminate approval of external loans and asked members to be conscious of the rate of principals of loans paid to service them and also called for balance in national and regional interest in all consideration.
“As it is right now, we have practically un- implementable budget. Every year, we have over 20,000 abandoned projects because they are not properly monitored. That is why the number of abandoned projects kept increasing every year. That is why I talked about balancing national, regional and constituency interest.
“Today, our national health care policy requires that if we have 10,000 functional primary health care centres, 70 percent of our healthcare needs would have been met. But today, we have nearly 40,000 physical structures called primary health care centres. A large number of these comes through constituency projects. In one constituency, you may have one primary health care center built by a member and the instead of equiping it abd making it functional, the other member coming in built another structure and the community end up having two structures that are useless to them. So, we need to streamline these things in the national interest” Ben Akabueze added.
