Reps Hike 2024 Budget To N28.777trn, Back GEOs’ Increased Revenue Profile
BY VICTOR BUORO – Buying into assurances of increased revenue profile by Government Owned Enterprises (GOEs) in the coming year, the National Assembly (NASS) has passed a budget of N28,777,404,073,861 for the 2024 fiscal year.
However, the budget, passed on Saturday by both the Senate and House of Representatives after the report of their separate Appropriation Committees, went up by N1.2 trillion compared to the initial figure submitted by President Bola Tinubu in the Appropriation Bill.
In presenting the Bill to the joint session of the National Assembly on November 29, President Tinubu had proposed a total of N27 trillion for the 2024 budget.
The Chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, Abubakar Bichi, who commented on the Appropriation Bill, explained the Committee held a one-way Town Hall meeting to get the citizens’ inputs on the Bill.
While noting that the budget presentation at the end of November was not in sync with extant law requiring the Appropriation Bill be presented to the parliament three months to the end of a fiscal year, Bichi the late presentation did put pressure on the Committee in processing the 2024 budget.
Bichi further told reporters that the N1.2 trillion increase was due to the inflationary trend as well as promise by Government Owned Enterprises (GOEs) to increase their revenue to about N700 billion in the year 2024.
According to him; “We have inflation and exchange rate for the dollar, the executive proposed N750 to the dollar, but after we studied carefully, we look at it , it is unrealistic.
“So we increased to N800. And also we had a meeting with the GOEs, we believe that there submissions is not enough. They have agreed to increase their revenue . That how we are able to get that 1.2 trillion, which we applied to capital.”
Commenting further on the bill, Hon Bichi said; “This is the first time the capital is bigger than recurrent. We appropriated about N850 billion for education, we gave them a lot of money. I believe this budget is brilliant and Nigerians will see a lot of impacts.”
Meanwhile, a breakdown of the Appropriation Bill as passed by the NASS shows that N1,742,786, 788,150 is for statutory transfers; N8,270,960,606,831 for debt servicing; N8,768,513,380,852 for
recurrent (non-debt) expenditure; and N9,995,143,298,028 as contribution to development fund for capital expenditure.
For statutory transfers, the
National Judicial Council (NJC) got the sum of N341,625,739,236; Niger-Delta Development Commission (NDDC) received N338,924,732,832,28;
Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) got N263,043,551,250,29; Senate got
N 49,144,916,519; while the House of Representatives received N78,624,487,169.
The sum of N97,913,321,898,40
and N82,922,332,768,163 are budgeted for the Presidency as recurrent and capital respectively while the Ministry of Defence got N1,308,493,771,066,41 as recurrent and N339,286,557,299 for capital.
On its part, the Ministry of Education got N857,134,132,339,80 for recurrent and N417,579,107,875,203 for capital expenditure while the Ministry of Works received N39,374,777,404,68 and N892,461,262,656,191 for recurrent and capital expenditure respectively.
