Sophia Michaels
Abubakar Kabir Abubakar, the Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, clarified that the increase of N1.2 trillion in the 2024 budget was a response to escalating inflation and the commitment from Government Owned Enterprises (GOEs) to boost their revenue to N700 billion.
He stated this while speaking during the presentation of the Appropriation Bill for passage at the Special Plenary on Saturday.
He said, “We have inflation and exchange rate for the dollar, the executive proposed N750 to the dollar, but after we studied carefully, we looked at it, it is unrealistic.
“So we increased to N800. And also we had a meeting with the GOEs, we believe that their submission is not enough. They have agreed to increase their revenue. That is how we are able to get that N1.2 trillion, which we applied to capital.
“This is the first time the capital is bigger than recurrent. We appropriate about N850 billion to education, we gave them a lot of money. I believe this budget is brilliant and Nigerians will see a lot of impacts”.
A breakdown of the Appropriation Bill passed by the National Assembly indicates that N1,742,786,788,150 is for statutory transfers; N8,270,960,606,831, debt servicing; N8,768, 513, 380, 852, recurrent (non-debt) expenditure and N 9,995,143,298,028 as contribution to development fund for capital expenditure.
