…Assures Senators on Constituency projects in two next week.
Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance Dr. Ngozi
Okonjo- Iweala yesterday disclosed that 13.7 percent of budget has been implemented so far.
The percent of budget performance has been an issue of serious contention between the executive and the legislature. While the minister had said the budget from April till date had performed at 56 per cent utilization, the House of Reps and Senate had maintained that the budget performance in the whole is 34 and 21.6 percent respectively.
But Okonjo spoke during an interactive session between the ministry and the senate that had threatened to arrest her if she failed to appear before them to explain the performance of the 2012 budget so far said the performance so far is 13.7 percent.
The lower chamber has also threatened to impeach President Jonathan if the budget performance does not improve when they return from their annual vacation in September.
Perhaps in an attempt to tame frayed nerves, She assured the national assembly that the contentious constituency projects will be given prompt attention in the next two weeks explaining that it had been delayed by procurement issues an design for the projects.
National assembly members have been accused of filing their companies through proxies who get contracts from Ministries, Departments and Agencies.
She also assured that the 2013 budget would be presented to the National Assembly by September this year just as she hinted that the budget was tampered with.
However sources said the disagreement between both arms of government is centered around the delay in release of funds for the execution of constituency projects, which the national assembly had put at N60bn.
It was gathered that while the 100bn was released to the senate, it leadership purportedly cornered 40bn admits silent grumbling by some senators.
Declaring the meeting open, the senate president represented by the leader of the senate, Victor Ndoma Egba had questioned the minister why the executive blamed the poor performance of the budget on constituency projects.
In the cause of the interaction which veered somewhat into a back and forth over constituency projects senators accused her of selective implementation of projects as well as starving the MDAs of funds to execute projects.
Shortly had she assured the senators of constituency projects than the senators started to trickle out of the conference room.
However, a senator in the course of the interaction berated his colleagues for delving from the issue for which they had invited her which is to explain why the budget had not performed properly and how to ensure a better performance going forward.
On the constituency projects Okonjo-Iweala told the senators “we absolutely no problem with these. What is happening now is that ministers are pursuing procurement process on those projects. For many of the new constituency projects, there is a need for design.
Speaking on the budget being tampered with, “on the 2012 budget we have full collaboration with NASS. We worked together and came to a reasonable budget, but there are one or two challenges inside which we have been working very collaboratively to solve, and that is that for certain projects and programs of some MDAs, there were resources that were moved from some areas to others making it a little bit difficult to implement with that movement. This has nothing to do with constituency projects.
They will be implemented as they are being designed.
“The first thing to note is that this budget implementation started in April after the budget was signed. I talking about what we have done so far, we are talking of utilization of resources since April.
Asked what has so far been released and utilized she said “The total amount appropriated for capital projects in N1.3 trillion.
we made sure salaries have been paid, personnel costs and pension of N971bn have been released, statutory transfers (about N156bn) have been done, debt servicing has been done, overheads of about N163bn has been released. So, about N1.6 trillion has been released for recurrent expenditure.
“Out of the total capital budget of N1.3 trillion, we started in April, we have so far released N404bn, we have cash-backed 324bn out of which 56 percent has been used meaning that there is still 44 percent of resources not used. So there is room for implementation.
“We are working to see that even the 44 percent left is used. The ministry of finance has released all the monies available. We are not holding back any money. On the 44 percent left to be used, ministers are working hard.
What is the implementation so far? I have not talked about execution.
Since this budget started in April, how much should we have released from then to July of the N1.3tr appropriated for capital projects? If we look at that pro-rated for those 4 months, N446 billion should have been released for capital, but we have released 404billion, and you look at the cash backing, the utilization as a percentage of that. that will be a proper way of looking at the budget. if we look at that ratio, you will see that we should have released 446 billion from April to July, we cashed backed 324bn. 184bn has been utilized and this gives you, if you want to look at the execution part of the budget, 41.3 percent. I have not talked about budget implementation before, I only spoke about the utilization of the resources, but now in terms of the budget, this is the way we will present it.
“N1.3 trillion was appropriated for capital project outside of the SURE-Programs, but if you add SURE-P to it, you get N1.5 trillion. If you pro-rate that amount months by months, because budget execution is supposed to take place months by months, you get a figure of n113 billion each month. If you want to measure it over the entire year, that means measuring it over 12 months, you get a figure of 13.7 percent. but we have been implementing for four months and we have been releasing like that because our money comes in every month, not in bulk.” She said.