Chamber seeks timely, realistic budgets

The Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry has called on all tiers of government to ensure that their respective budgets are timely and realistic, to avoid incessant failures of socio-economic plans, with specific targets on projects that would affect the citizens positively.

The President of the chamber, Thony Ejikeonye said such development would address the challenges in the nation’s budget formulation and implementation process.

According to him, ‘’some of the figures that are stated into our budgets are not realistic and if the budget is not well structured, it will fail’’. He said one of the major reasons for budget implementation failure is because of over-bloated expenditure of governments. “This is where we always give government knocks.

Usually, our budget is supposed to be ready long before January 1. In other economies of the world, their 2016 budgets has already been passed. If you don’t have a financial plan that you will work with, it’s a key to failure. So what we will advise government is to make sure the budget is ready on time.

And then they should always use adequate benchmarks for inflow of revenue’’. While noting with concern that there has always been sharp disagreements between the executive and legislature in the area of budget benchmark, Ejinkeonye urged policy makers to stop playing politics with the country’s budget parameters.

He noted that “one of the problems we have is that the government usually set these budget benchmarks based on political considerations without consideration for the country, but when the interest of the country is paramount, realistic budget benchmarks will be set. So it’s high time our leaders stopped playing politics with budget parameters.’’

Ejinkeonye also called for reduction in the cost of governance at all levels, while seeking decentralisation of some of the ministries, whose services are needed at the rural areas but concentrated in the capital.

“Most civil servants are concentrated in the urban areas but we equally need their services in the rural areas. You find, for instance, that in a ministry where the bulk of its workers are supposed to be in rural areas, a lot of them are in Abuja. So, we need to redeploy our workforce effectively and efficiently,’ he added.’