Nigeria to Run 2015 Budget in Deficit - Senate

After much lamentation over the 2015 budget, the Appropriation Bill for the current fiscal year scaled second reading on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday with senators describing the estimates as a deficit budget whose content is grossly exaggerated.

Leading debate on the bill, Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, said the budget of N4.357 trillion comprised N2.6 trillion as recurrent expenditure, N627 billion capital expenditure, N943 billion for debt service and N411 billion for statutory transfers.

He also said the document was predicated on $65 oil benchmark, projected oil production of 2.2782 million barrels per day and an exchange rate of N165 to $1.
Ndoma-Egba said the budget would focus on job creation through increasing economic diversification and leakages, roads, power, gas and aviation.

He added that the 2015 budget is a framework that will consolidate and add impetus to the transformation agenda of the federal government with the intention to promote economic growth, job creation, poverty reduction and service delivery.

In his submission, Senate Committee Chairman on Finance, Senator Ahmed Makarfi, called for "extreme caution" in the effort to appropriate the budget, noting that the benchmark for the budget had not been determined. He argued that budget could not be appropriated without first determining the benchmark.

While recalling that the capital expenditure contained in the 2014 budget was N1.4 trillion when compared with N627 billion in the current estimates, Makarfi described the estimates as "austerity budget" and insisted that the current economic downturn is a wake-up call on Nigeria to stop relying on oil "which is highly volatile and look for other areas of getting money." Read more of the analysis on Thisdaylive