President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday in Abuja has signed the 2020 appropriation bill of N10,594,362,364,830 into law, triggering a January-December budget cycle for Nigeria.
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports the executive arm of government and the National Assembly took pragmatic steps to actualise the feat of January-December budget cycle for the nation.
Nigeria was accustomed to this sequence of public expenditure until the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1999 when the two arms involved in budget preparation and approval brought distortion to bear on the ritual due to a slew of fraud, conspiracy and incompetence.
Recall that President Buhari on 26 May 2019, signed the 2019 N8.3 trillion budget into law, which he forwarded to the legislature on December 19, 2018.
Those of 2016 and 2017 followed the same trajectory of being signed on May 6 and June 12 of the fiscal year respectively.
Earlier fiscal years were not different, resulting in the Presidency and the parliament passing the buck against each other. Both are culpable.
TNG notes that the budget process has to go through four critical processes which are: drafting, legislative approval, implementation and; monitoring and evaluation.
President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, had vowed to end the trend of budget delays, by repeatedly advising the Presidency to present the 2020 Appropriation Bill on time so that it could be passed before lawmakers proceed on Christmas break.
The 2020 budget was increased from N10.33 trillion to N10.594billion by the National Assembly. N560.47 billion of the total budget is for statutory transfers while N2.7 trillion is for debt service.
Other breakdown of the budget include N4,842,974,600,640 for Recurrent Expenditure; Capital expenditure N2,465,418,006,955; Fiscal Deficit N2.28 trillion and Deficit/GDP N1.52 per cent.
The budget as passed by the National Assembly also maintained Nigeria’s daily oil production rate at 2.18 million per barrel, but increased the Oil Benchmark Price to 57 dollars per barrel against the 55 dollars proposed by the Executive.
The signed 2020 budget also retained inflation rate at 10.81 per cent and the exchange rate at N305 to a dollars as proposed by the executive.
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo; Senate President Ahmad Lawan; the Speaker, House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila; Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr Boss Mustapha as well as presidential aides witnessed the signing of the budget at President’s mini-conference hall.