FOR the first five months of this year, the Federal Government has spent a total of N1.44 trillion, comprising of N1.03 trillion on Recurrent Expenditure, made of salaries and overheads, while the balance of N404 billion has been released for capital votes implementation.

The Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, gave this breakdown yesterday, at a briefing to debunk insinuations in some quarters that the Nigerian economy was broke and was no longer meeting her financial commitments.

Accompanied at the briefing by the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Dr. Bright Okogu and the Accountant-General of the Federation, Jonah Otunla, the minister explained that the little challenges encountered by the agencies of the Federal Government in accessing their funds was due to the current glitches arising from the full computerisation of government’s accounting system.

She also used the occasion to announce the appointment of an Acting Director-General at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the person of Bolaji Ibrahim, who is the most senior Director at the SEC.

He is to resume duties on Monday, as “the Federal Government has declined to extend the tenure of the SEC board which tenure ends today.

Defending further the Federal Government’s liquidity position, Iweala said from the revenue profile of Government in the first five months, Government suffered a shortfall of N376 billion, which was raised by the Debt Management Office and maintained that there was no cause for alarm.

She added that N304 billion was released as first quarter capital votes, out which N239.8 billion, representing 39 per cent only had been accessed and utilised by MDAs so far and another sum of N100 billion released on Thursday, thus providing enough funds for MDAs to execute their budgetary plans, hence there was no reason for complaints by them.

Her words: “I am really completely puzzled by this issue of releases and cash-crunch and I want to say to you that that is not the case. We have just looked at utilization of the first quarter allocation that we released and we are at about 39 per cent utilisation. So there is still plenty of room for MDAs to spend.

“The reason it is 29 per cent now is because the last year ended in March this year and this utilisation is only till the end of last moth, May. But this is the last time we are going to extend our Budget cycle. From year 2013, there will be no more extension. We have begun the process of the fiscal year 2013 Budget because we want to address the pitfalls of delays in budgets implementation, so that we can have it passed in December this year.

“We are expecting utilisation to speed up in terms of implementation. But as at now, I can assure you that the issue of cash -crunch is not there; that releases have all their cash backing, which has not fully been utilised and we are about to have a cash management meeting now so we can release the second quarter allocation.

“We have equally released the recurrent allocation. And there has been no delay in paying our salaries and meeting other commitments. Now I want to say one thing, as you know, we are implementing an integrated payroll management system so that we can pay people directly instead of the old system that we had where we would send the money to their MDAs and they would take charge of the payments.

“But we are computerising the whole thing and it will make for more transparency. Now, induing the computerization, there are sometimes glitches with the software and connectivity and that has happen now and again so that a few civil servant may not get their salaries on time because of network connectivity or glitches in the system.

“The Accountant-General Office has worked so hard to bring down the number of staff who are affected from 15,000 to 3000 and now we have only 300 of them. And we are working very hard to ensure that that does not even arise. You can see that if you are paying about 100,000 people salaries and you have 300 that are affected, that is not so bad. But you know if your salary hasn’t been paid, you would notbfeel so good about it. So we are working really really hard to ensure that not even one person is affected.

“But there is no issue with the recurrent budget with regards to paying the bills of the Government. We are working with the people that install the software to correct this challenge and correct any abnormalities. We are also working with the banks, the individual banks where the accounts are.

“Again let me say one thing, there is no where in the world where you are changing the entire payroll management system that you do not have glitches, we are all aware of that. I am actually quite proud that as of this moment, we are working the glitches out one by one, so bear with us,” the minister further explained.

Otunla said the implementation of the of the integrated pay roll and the GIFMIS had save the country the sum of N14 billion as at April 2012 and fingered 43,000 ghost workers.

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