A comparison of Nigeria’s budget for this year and the profit that superstar company, Apple, declared for 2018 is capable of giving any patriotic Nigerian a head ache.
The Deputy Speaker, House of Representatives, Mr Yusuf Lasun, gave the indication on Wednesday when he did an analysis on the feebleness of the budget.
He said, “In contributing to this debate on this 2019 budget, the question is whether we have a budget that can sustain the size of the population we have. The answer is, no. We are not what we think we are as a nation. We can deduct it from the figures the executive arm of government has always sent to us. We think we are a rich country but from the figures, we are very poor.
“The 2019 budget says the proposal is N8.7tn, of which if we do a direct conversion, that is just merely $28.5bn. What does that mean? It means the totality of the Nigerian budget for 2019 is just $29bn. Apple alone declare a profit of almost $100bn after tax. So, if for 160 million people, it shows that for 2019, the total money that is due for one head is just $178.52 in a year. And so we all have the duty as Nigerians to begin to think outside the box of how we can develop our country.”
Lasun made the comparison when the House had a second reading of the budget, during which it discovered some errors.
Although only about 42 members attended the session, meaning that they could not form a quorum, they yet discussed the budget and returned it to the executive for corrections.
A member,, Mr Abubakar Adamu, identified some errors thus: “I want to, before my contribution, raise some issues, particularly some errors I noticed in the national budget. As everybody knows, the schedule in the budget consists of part ‘A’ which is the statutory transfers, and part ‘B’ which is the Debt Servicing, part ‘C’ which is the recurrent expenditure and part ‘D’ which is the capital expenditure.”
He added that in the Ministry of Education, the recurrent expenditure which consisted of both the personnel and overhead cost, was N462.2bn.
According to Adamu, under the summary of the budget by the MDAs, (line item Number 410518), the figure has changed to N539bn, giving the example of the ministry of finance where the recurrent expenditure was N10.8bn, under which personnel was N7.4bn.
, “In the ministry of budget and planning, in the part ‘C’ is N9.3bn, but when you go to the summary by MDAs, which is number 280238, personnel has now become N66.21bn. Then, overhead also changed there; it has now become N832.2bn. Then the total, which is personnel and overheard, in that aspect has now become N1.49bn.
“The capital also has changed to about N655.9bn, indicating that a total allocation of the Ministry of Budget and Planning, instead of N9.3bn, has now become N2.15tn,” Adamu added.
