We can no longer fund 2017 budget -FG

*Says 60% of Capital Votes will be rolled over to 2018 budget
Olufemi Samuel, Abuja

With barely two months to the end of the current fiscal year, the Federal Government affirmed that the 2017 Budget has ran into a hitch with paucity of funds to finance it, thus making an acceptanle implementation a near impossibility.

The government said specifically that it could no longer fund the capital projects provided for in the 2017 national budget owing to the problem.

By implication, 60 percent of revenue proposed for funding the 2017 budget will now be rolled over to the next year’s budget.

The Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun and his counterpart in the Ministry of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma made this known during an interactive session with Senators on Tuesday.

The Minister of Finance had admitted that the cumulative releases on recurrent expenditure has not exceeded a total of N1.5trillion

She told Senators that so far, the federal government only released the sum of N3.40 billion to fund capital projects for which the sum of N2.240 trillion was budgeted.

She added that by the end of this week, the government would have released a total sum of N440.9 billion on capital budget for 2017″

The Minister said that N128.8 billion has been released for statutory transfers;N128.8 billion, while Funds released for Pensions stood at N37.8billion.

For overheads, N92.4billion has been released while Service Wide votes has so far gulped 223.6billion

The Senate had last week invited the two ministers for a meeting after complaining against poor implementation of budget 2017 which they stressed had not enjoyed up to 15% funding.

It described as unacceptable the release of less than 15% of the N2.240 trillion voted for capital projects in the N7.44 trillion 2017, warning against possible reeling back of the economy into recession if the trend is not curbed early.

Udoma Udoma, on his own, attributed the poor implementation of the budget to the delay by Senate in approving the Federal Government’s plan to borrow some money to fund the 2017 budget

The Budget passed by National Assembly and signed by the then Acting President last June showed that Statutory Transfers got N434 billion, while N1.8 trillion is for Debt Servicing, N177.5 billion for Sinking Fund for Maturity Bonds and N2.99 trillion for Recurrent Non-Debt Expenditure.

On why workers in some federal agencies were still being owed backlog of salaries which had been accommodated in the budget, Adeosun said it the problem arose from illegal recruitment in most of those agencies.

She said, “Although the illegal recruitment has been there in the past, the practice is more rampant now”.

Director General in the Budget Office, Ben Akabueze, also told the lawmakers that of the N2.05trillion earmarked as revenue to fund 2017 budget, only N1.2trillion has been realised so far.

Reacting on the crises over 2017 Budget, Senator Barau Jibril of the APC from Kano State, said: “We are now in the month of October, which Adeosun also informed the Senate that Cumulative releases on current Expenditure is N1.5trillion us with less than three months to the end of the year. What you have released is not up to the total amount budgeted for a quarter of the budget.

“There is a big problem. We are politicians. And when we go by what we are hearing is that things are not going on fine. It has never been as worse as this. I have been a player, particularly in respect to public expenditure right from 1999 till date. Whereas you talked about how we are doing very well in terms of revenue projection, yet we are having this problem.

“I think there’s a big problem and this is really injurous to our party, the APC. We do not want to have problem in our party, we don’t want problem in our government.”