Buhari awaits NASS on 2017 budget, says presidency

The Presidency said President Muhammadu Buhari was waiting for the National Assembly (NASS) to conclude work on the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP) before presenting next year’s budget Bill.

Senior Special Assistant to the President (Senate), Senator Solomon Ita-Enang, declared at a press briefing yesterday that serious consultation was also going on between the Presidency and all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to ensure that all figures and facts in the Bill were properly verified and confirmed before being presented to the National Assembly.

According to Ita-Enang, the leadership of the two chambers of the National Assembly is also being consulted very carefully, so that at the end of the day, the budget proposal would not be strange to them when presented.

The Senate failed to begin debate on the MTEF and FSP document, as it had announced last week.

The President had in the MTEF and FSP document sent to the National Assembly about three weeks ago disclosed that a total figure of
N6, 866,335,052,740 for the next fiscal year.

In that communication, the President also disclosed that the federal government would set up a $25billion Infrastructural Development Fund as a means of attracting non-budgetary resources to fund its development projects.

According to the document, the country’s debt stock was N16.3trillion ($61.45billion) as at June 30, this year.
The document also showed that in adherence to the three percent threshold set out in the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007, the 2017 fiscal deficit was projected at N2.7trillion in nominal terms.

The aggregate revenue to fund the budget, according to the Budget framework, is expected to increase over this year’s estimate of N3.855trillion by about eight per cent or about N313billion.

The federal government proposed a total sum of N1.3trillion as oil revenue to fund the budget, including N14 billion for NLNG Dividend and N1billion from share of minerals and mining, while non-oil revenue is projected at N1.5trillion.