On December 14, 2016, President Muhammadu Buhari presented the 2017 Budget Proposal to a Joint Session of the National Assembly. Five months later, on May 11, 2017, the National Assembly passed the Budget (or Appropriation Bill), as it is formally known, into law, with changes.
Some of those changes were not acceptable to the Executive. For example the decision of the National Assembly to cut down the funding for a number of critical infrastructure projects, and to allocate that money to new projects introduced by the Assembly. What followed the passage were therefore four weeks of negotiations, regarding the restoration of full funding for those projects.
It took four weeks to come to an agreement, and, finally, on Monday June 12, 2017, six months after the President submitted the Budget, Acting President Yemi Osinbajo assented to it. The Appropriation Bill is now an Act of Parliament.
The good news is that the National Assembly has agreed to restore all of the affected funding, upon the submission of a request by the Executive, in a process known as ‘Virement’.
The 2017 budget is the first budget in Nigeria’s history prepared using a custom-developed software application for uploading and collating, instead of the conventional paper method that is prone to error and manipulation. The new application allows users to track versions, and to see who is altering what. To support this the Budget Office established a special HelpDesk to help guide Ministries, Departments and Agencies through the e-submission process.
We also continued with the Zero-Based Budgeting system we adopted and trialled for the first time with the 2016 budget.
MAJOR HIGHLIGHTS:
• The passed budget is 7.44 trillion Naira, an increase of about 140 billion naira over the 7.298 trillion Naira proposed by the Executive
• The infrastructure component is 2.18 trillion Naira, which is about 30 percent of the total budget. (1.2 trillion Naira was spent on infrastructure in the 2016 budget — a record sum — of the roughly 1.8 trillion Naira budgeted for that purpose)
• The 2017 budget signed into law by Acting President Osinbajo is based on the following assumptions: an oil price benchmark of US$44.50 per barrel (Executive originally proposed US$42.50), average crude oil production of 2.2 million barrels per day, and an exchange rate of N305/dollar
• The 2017 budget prioritizes Roads and Railway Projects, Social Housing, Special Economic Zones, Social Investment Programmes, River Basin Development, Presidential Amnesty Programme, and development in the Niger Delta and North East.
• Priority Road Projects in the budget include the following: The Second Niger Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Abuja-Abaji-Lokoja Road, Kano-Maiduguri Road, Enugu-Port Harcourt Road, Benin-Sagamu Road, and the Odukpani-Itu-Ikot Ekpene Road.
• Priority Rail Projects in the budget include the Lagos-Kano Rail and the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Rail.
Courtesy: Ministry of National Planning and Budget
