Nigeria: 2009 Budget - Presidency, Nass, MDAs to Spend N2 Billion On Generators
Otei Oham, Festus Owete and Adetutu Folasade-Koyi
6 January 2009


Legislators have queried the Interior Ministry for proposing to spend N40 million for this year's National Day celebration which cost only N16 million in 2008.

It also emerged on Monday that Aso Rock, the National Assembly and ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) plan spending over N2 billion to buy, maintain and fuel power generators in 2009, perhaps an indication that public supply may not improve this year.
The details are in the budget passed by the Senate on December 17, 2008.

However, the amount may be higher than the one approved by the Senators, as some MDAs did not disclose such expenses under the subhead submitted to the National Assembly.

Many MDAs indicated the expenses under Maintenance of Plant/Generators as well as fuel costs, others grouped it with Miscellaneous Expenses.
Aso Rock will spend N27 million to fuel its generators, and intends to spend N14.3 million to maintain them.

A further break down shows that:

• The National Assembly (fuel, N233 million); National Assembly Office (fuel, N63 million), (maintenance, N57.2 million).

• The National Assembly White House, which houses Chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives has N58 million for fuelling and N55 million for maintenance.

• The National Assembly Service Commission (NASC) (fuel and maintenance, N25.8 million).

• Police formations nationwide (fuel and maintenance, N110 million).

• Police Affairs Ministry (N9.2 million); Police Pension Office (N3.7 million).

• Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (purchase, N9.2 million), (fuel, N24.6 million), and (maintenance, N3.6 million).

• Independent Corrupt Practices and other Offences Commission (ICPC) (fuel, N30 million), (maintenance, N5 million).

• Ministry of Defence (fuel, N39.5 million), (maintenance, N50 million).

• The Navy (N63.019 million); Air Force (fuel, N19.427 million), (maintenance, N98 million); Defence Headquarters (N15.6 million).

• Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) (fuel and maintenance, N16.9 million); Nigerian Defence College (NDC) (fuel, N15.8 million), (maintenance, N12.6 million).

• Command and Staff College, Jaji (fuel, N16.7 million), (maintenance, N15.540 million); Defence Intelligence Agency (fuel, N11.8 million), (maintenance, N4.9 milllion).

• Foreign Affairs Ministry (fuel, N58.5 million), (maintenance, N25 million).

• The Foreign Affairs Ministry will also spend sums ranging from N400,000 to N500,000 to fuel and maintain generators in its missions in African countries: For example, in Freetown, Sierra Leone (fuel, N443,000), (maintenance, N179,000).

• Finance Ministry (fuel, N105.4 million), (maintenance, N49.2 million); Works, Housing and Urban Development (N48 million), Justice (N20 million), Labour (N4.3 million), and Fire Service (N21 million).

• Office of the Head of Service of the Federation (N40 million); Civil Defence, Immigration and Prisons Service Board (N11 million), Civil Defence Corps (N115 million), Prisons Service (N18.4 million), and Immigration (N76 million).

• Interior Ministry (N182 million), Commerce and Industry Ministry (N35 million), Information and Communications (N43 million), and Youth Development and National Orientation (N6 million).

Back on the National Day celebration, members of the House of Representatives Interior Committee told Interior Minister, Godwin Abe, at a meeting that the N40 million voted for it is outrageous, as the ministry also proposes to spend N48 million to maintain vehicles.

And they criticised the ministry for planning to spend N102 million under the subhead of 'Other Miscellaneous.'

The meeting was prelude to today's resumption of the House after the Christmas and New Year break that lasted two weeks.

The priority of the House is to pass its own version of the N2.7 trillion budget presented by President Umaru Yar'Adua.

The Senate, which reconvenes next week, approved the budget before it began its holiday on December 18 last year.

At the meeting of the Interior Committee, where the ministry's Permanent Secretary, Jeff Nwosu, was also in attendance, the lawmakers observed that N102 million was spent out of the N130 million released to the ministry in the 2008 budget.

They advised the ministry to earmark about N20 million for the National Day celebration.

Committee Chairman, Jerry Manwe, asked the officials to return at a later date with the details, including what constitutes 'Other Miscellaneous.'
Nwosu explained that the subhead refers to, among other items, sitting allowance, publicity, medical expenses, welfare, inspection allowance, and media activities.

But the lawmakers countered that the items are already built into other subheads in the budget.

Nwosu told reporters after the meeting that "if we knew what the lawmakers were going to ask us, we would have come with the details.
"It is a matter of getting the information we have. The documents they have was dated September (2008), but we are in 2009 and we have to update our records to December 31."

The Committee also queried the ministry for including the N109 million trapped in AllStates Trust Bank in revenue projection.
It directed the ministry to liaise with Oceanic Bank which acquired AllStates Trust and ensure that the money is retrieved.

Abe said lack of understanding of the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPP) Act posed a major challenge to the ministry last year, but that it would brush up to meet targets this year.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200901060177.html

Nigeria: N-Assembly Passes Budget 2008
Leon Usigbe, Emma Aziken and Laide Akinboade
12 February 2008


Lagos — THE Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday, at separate sessions, passed the 2008 Appropriation Bills, after several postponements.

While the Senate added N500 billion to the N2.4 trillion proposed by President Umaru Yar'Adua, the House of Representatives topped it with N491 billion.

The spending plan passed by the Senate set a strict regime for the implementation of the budget with mandatory clauses requiring government departments to give periodic reports on their level of implementation of the budget to the National Assembly.

Senate passes N2.9trn budget

Towards levelling one of the constraints against the implementation of capital budgets, the Senate also gave notice of a bill aiming to compel the Due Process Unit of the administration to approve or reject proposals to it within 30 days.

The spending plan includes N163.6 billion for Statutory Transfer, N372 billion for Debt Service, N1.4 trillion for Recurrent (Non-Debt) Expenditure and N952 billion for Capital Expenditure.


The expenditure is to be executed from a revenue base funded by oil revenue of $59 per barrel with a production capacity of 2.45 million barrels per day and an exchange rate of N117 to the dollar.

The oil benchmark which was lifted from the $53.83 proposed by the executive was the only assumption altered in the key assumptions for revenue presented by President Umaru Yar'Adua to the National Assembly.

The other assumptions including a GDP growth rate of 11 per cent, inflation rate of 8.5 per cent and joint venture cash call of $4.97 billion were left as presented.


The top spending ministries under the recurrent side of the budget are Interior - N252.6 billion, Education - N168.64 billion, Defence - N158.05 billion and Health - N89.45 billion.


Under the capital expenditure proposals, Transportation has N199.6 billion, Energy - N126.4 billion, Agric and Water Resources - N119.3 billion, Federal Capital Territory - N61.85 billion, Health - N60.2 billion and Education - N52.32 billion.

The revenue base for the budget was boosted by the capture of a number of revenue items that were not included in the proposal or captured in past budgets.

Some of these are the N2.51 billion Miscellaneous Oil Revenue (Pipeline fees), N67.46 billion Signatures Bonus brought forward as at 1/1/08 and not included in the Executive profile, Customs 7 per cent Port Levy of N6.87 billion, N42 billion Education Tax, Customs levies and surcharges brought forward as at 01/01/08, not captured in the Executive profile, amounting to N12.49 billion, and 5 per cent sugar levy of N2.83 billion.

Also included in the Senate revenue base are the monetisation proceeds from the sale of motor vehicles Nl.01 billion and FIRS PAYE recovery totalling N8.64 billion.

To ensure effective implementation of the budget, the Senate also approved some mandatory clauses in the budget bill, which read in part:

• (1) The Accountant-General of the Federation shall, when authorised to do so by warrants issued by the minister charged with responsibility for finance, pay out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation during the year ending on the 31st day of December 2008 the sums specified by the warrants, not exceeding in the aggregate N2,898,801,095,668.00 (Two Trillion, Eight Hundred and Ninety Eight Billion, Eight Hundred and One Million, Ninety Five Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixty Eight Naira) only.

(2) The amount mentioned in subsection (1) of this section shall be appropriated to heads of expenditure as indicated in the Schedule to this Act.

(3) No part of the amount aforesaid shall be issued from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation after the end of the year mentioned in subsection (1) of this section.

• All amounts appropriated under this Act shall be released from the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation only for the purposes specified in the Schedule to this Act.

•In the event that the implementation of any of the projects intended to be undertaken under this Act cannot be completed without virement, such virement shall only be effected with the prior approval of the National Assembly.

•(1) The Accountant-General of the Federation shall immediately upon the coming into force of this Act maintain a separate record for the documentation of Revenue accruing to the Consolidated Revenue Fund in excess of oil price benchmark adopted in this Budget.

(2) Such revenues as specified in Sub-Section (1) of this section refers to Revenues accruing from sales of government crude oil in excess of $59 per barrel, the Petroleum Profit Tax and Royalty on Oil and Gas.

•The Accountant-General of the Federation shall immediately upon the coming into force of this Act create an Account in the Central Bank of Nigeria for all monies accruing into the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federal Government; from the Special Funds impounded by Executive Order of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

• No fund shall be paid out of the monies arising from the record specified in Section (4) and /or the Account specified in Section (5) or in both sections 4 & 5 of this Act except by an Act of the National Assembly.

Omisore speaks on budget

Explaining details of the budget at a press conference following the Senate passage of the budget, Senator Iyiola Omisore, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriation said:

"The other contentious issue that has taken the attention of Nigerians has been the issue of due process. The bill that has just been passed today (yesterday) has made it compulsory that, once the bill is signed by the President, all appropriations for people who have capital or recurrent projects that required due process clearance must initiate action and complete it within 30 days. If they fail they can be prosecuted.

"To also ensure that budget provisions are fully implemented, all accounting officers of ministries, parastatals, agencies of government that control heads of expenditures are required to furnish the National Assembly quarterly reports detailing the implementation of the budget.

"To put all revenue generating agencies on the alert and capture all monies in consonance with the 1999 constitution, all monies for the Consolidated Revenue Fund must be appropriated through the National Assembly. We have added some clauses to the Act to ensure that the budget is not delayed due to due process specification, to ensure that the necessary fiscal revenue provisions are adhered to strictly.

"Some of them are for emphasis. There must be a return on all the releases, quarterly report from the Ministry of Finance. These are the statutory role of the ministries and MDAs to the National Assembly, which have been ignored in the last nine years. It has become the law of the land. Whoever violates this law becomes an offender," he said.

"It also bears repeating that this is a pro-poor budget for the people of Nigeria," he said.

House okays budget

On its part, the House of Representatives approved $59 per barrel as benchmark for the budget against the $53.8 per barrel in the original bill.

The report of the budget which was presented to the House by the chairman the Appropriation Committee, Mr. Festus Adegoke, showed that the budget has a deficit of N190 billion reduced from the original N350 billion deficit.

The difference between the budget passed by the House and the one passed by the Senate has engendered the setting up of a Conference Committee of the two chambers of the National Assembly to harmonise the figures before it is taken to the President for his assent.

Both chambers had hoped to avoid this in order not to waste further time before the President assents to it.

Chairman of the House Committee on Finance, Mr. John Enoh, while contributing to the debate on the budget, called attention to certain sub-heads in the budget that he said needed to be adjusted before passage.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200802130159.html

[quote[b]]It also emerged on Monday that Aso Rock, the National Assembly and ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) plan spending over N2 billion to buy, maintain and fuel power generators in 2009, perhaps an indication that public supply may not improve this year[/b].
The details are in the budget passed by the Senate on December 17, 2008.[quote][/quote]

To See a breakdown of the budget, please go to

2009 Budget breakdown

2008 Budget BreakDown


We have spent trillions of Naira in 2008. What was acheived with all that money spent? Why is the government, instead of investing in power, looking to throw more money down the drain with more generators. fuel to power them and cause more harm to our environment?