The Federal Government spent 80.6 per cent of all earned revenue between January and November 2022 on debt service. Out of N6.50tn earned, N5.24tn was spent on debt service. The implication is that the remaining 19.4 per cent would be shared between salaries, emoluments and overheads, capital expenditure and statutory transfers as well as service-wide votes.
But the remaining percentage cannot even pay salaries and overheads and as such, the country literally borrows to run the administration and execute basic governance functions.
In the approved 2023 federal budget, the overall budget deficit is N10.78tn and over N500bn unfunded deficit. In this kind of scenario, the expectation is that the borrowed funds will be deployed in accordance with the Fiscal Responsibility Act which states that borrowing should only be for capital expenditure and human development.
Let us start from the State House. The sum of N7.2bn was approved for “annual routine maintenance of mechanical/electrical installations of the Villa.” What exactly are we maintaining? This has been a conduit to get money out of the treasury on a yearly basis. In 2022, the sum of N5.176bn was voted for this. At N26.4m for newspapers, this sum will buy 105,729 newspapers at N250 per newspaper. This is simply outrageous.
Service wide votes recorded special intervention , special intervention SDG1 , special intervention SDG2, special interventions programmes/projects, national social investment programme {recurrent}. These votes are without details and specificity, exactly a play on words.
SMEDAN got N440m for “one local government one product ,” a mere slogan devoid of any specific activity. If SMEDAN insists it will change lives with this money, considering that it is an ongoing project, let it provide the details of how previous allocations were spent.
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