The House of Representatives on Sunday disclosed that despite contrary information from the government, the Federal Government’s yearly expenditure was “over N20tn,” instead of the N4.6tn (2014) or N4.3tn (2015) as contained in the annual public budget made available to Nigerians.
This was disclosed by the Chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts, Mr. Adeola Solomon Olamilekan, in Abuja, noting that, ongoing examination of the finances of government and its 601 agencies has shown that the N4.3tn given as the total spending budget for this year was far from the reality.
According to him, the N4.3tn, for example, does not include spending of many “statutory and extra-ministerial departments” of government, adding that his committee found out that these other agencies not captured in the regular budget, generated and spent their money as it pleased them without seeking the approval of the National Assembly.
He puts the budget of these other bodies at over N16tn.
The lawmaker further explained: “The N4.9tn, N4.6tn or N4.3tn, as the case may be, is the budget that the whole Nigerians are listening to but in the true sense of it, the budget of other statutory and extra-ministerial departments put together is about N16tn.
“So, the total overall budget year in year out is over N20tn, which the executive arm operates, but nobody is asking questions as to the implementation of all these budgets.
“Nobody is bringing information on the implementation of all these budgets; and this is one area Nigerians need to start asking questions in order to move this country forward.”
Solomon-Olamilekan said despite the fact that the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007, made adequate provisions, the bodies should be held accountable as the law was being observed in breach, adding that the “stifling” of the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation was one of the ways to shield government agencies from opening their books to scrutiny.
According to the lawmaker, the office of the Accountant General is rendered useless by starving it of funds “over the years” to a point that it had no financial power to effectively audit the accounts of the implementation agencies of government and its extra-ministerial departments.
He further revealed that, for example, the government cut the capital budget of the AGF’s office from N1.9bn to a “meagre” N100m in 2015, asking how the office would audit the accounts of 601 agencies with N100m and the country’s 144 foreign missions.
“How can we imagine that the capital budget of the office of AGF for the year 2015 was reduced from N1.9bn to N100?
“Can you also imagine an office of the AGF that has 144 foreign missions to audit and as we speak, between 1999 to date, that office has not audited up to 30 of these foreign missions while three quarter of these foreign missions are also revenue generating agencies?
“So, there is nobody to audit the revenue generated and the expenditure they incur.
“The office of the AGF has been short-changed and the budget has been reduced to nothing. As such, the government of the day is having a field day to carry out whatever its wants to do because they know they have an office that is not functioning.”
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