The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said on Saturday that despite the alterations of figures in the fake budget submitted to the National Assembly as original, the falsified 2016 budget was not padded because the total figure voted for all ministries had not exceeded N6.08 trillion which was the official sum proposed by the government in the original document.
Briefing journalists in Lagos, Lai Mohammed said: “The total for every ministry has remained exactly the same as what was submitted to the National Assembly.
“A lot has been said about the budget. Let me make it clear that nobody can ever accuse this government of padding any budget.
“The total of all ministries put together has not exceeded N6.08 trillion that was submitted. It is factually incorrect to say that the budget was padded.”
The briefing was not clear, to say the least. Unless the Minister meant despite the inflated item figures, the cross-head sub-totals and totals remained unaltered. And nobody would argue about that as padding the budget. But who did it and why, all await the police investigators and the Presidency.
Unless it was all solely for the perpetrators’ nuisance value and to delay passage by the national Assembly and, for that matter, delay implementation by the Executive.
He continued: “This is the first time in the history of this country that a government will embark on what is called zero-based budget.
“Before now, the budget system was what was called an envelope system. In an envelope system, there is no justification as to why we need N30 billion for a structure.’
“This year, we decided that every ministry must have a zero-based budget. In other word, you must justify and explain why you need N100 billion.
“This is very good system, the software for it was also very different. The personnel were not used to it.
“Now, in the process, we got to National Assembly. What the ministers do is to have a broad overview of the budget. The template used by the Budget Office is uniform for all ministers.’’
The minister also said exports, balance of trade, Gross Domestic Product were responsible for currency appreciation and depreciation.
“Before now, we used to sell crude for about 100 dollar per barrel which means if we produce two million barrels per day, you have something in the region of 200 million dollar less the expenditure of production and others.
“But today for the same two million barrels, you have less than 60 million dollars less the cost of production.’’
“Clearly if your major source of exchange is crude and it has gone down from 100 per cent, you have lost 70 per cent of your source.
“What the government is doing is to ensure that the little resources we have are properly managed. Part of decision we took was Treasury Single Account.
“Others include blocking all sorts of corruption and diversify economy so that we can get foreign exchange from other sources,’’ he said.
-NAN
