The council also agreed to peg the production of crude oil at 2.2 million barrels per day, but was however not forthcoming on whether it would continue with the fuel subsidy regime or not.
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In 2015, the government budgeted N4.5 trillion of which recurrent expenditure gulped N4.312 trillion. “We will try and reduce overheads, but keep personnel cost, we are not going to adjust it by much”, Udoma stated.
On the exchange rate, he said the government was “working on the exchange rate that the Central Bank of Nigeria has given us”.
“The level of borrowing that we anticipate and we are projecting will be well within the maximum that we allow, which is 3 percent of the GDP, because want a prudent budget”, he said.
President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office in May, has said his administration wants to diversify the oil-reliant economy by boosting the agriculture and mining sectors while cracking down on corruption to end the leakage of money from public coffers.
He said ministers in the continent’s top crude producer, which depends on oil receipts for 70 percent of government revenues, aimed to fund this through a rise in non-oil revenues. “But we are expecting some savings from the IPPIS (Integrated Pay roll and Personnel information System), which we are using, so we are not cutting anybody’s salary, everybody will get their salaries”, he added.
ABUJA Dec 8 Nigeria’s government plans to spend 500 billion naira ($2.5 billion) in 2016 on social welfare programmes for the poorest people in Africa’s most populous nation, draft budget plans sent to lawmakers on Tuesday showed. In its budget for 2015, the finance ministry was compelled to revise down the assumed oil price several times before submitting it based on $65 a barrel in December 2014.
The approved MTEF, the minister said, will be forwarded to the National Assembly.
“And so next year, we are looking at an expansionist budget”, Udoma said.
It is when the budget is finalised that you really see the details of what we intend to do.
“This sets out the policies of government over the next three years”.
The Guardian reported that two labour centres have unfolded plans to present a new minimum wage proposal to the Federal Government for promulgation into law.
Nigeria’s lawmakers have been divided over the contents of the current 200-page PIB.
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The head of state has begun an overhaul of the state-run oil company and forced government departments and agencies to deposit revenues in a single treasury account for better monitoring and transparency. It sets out the fundamental economic underpinning of the budget.
