The Senior Special Assistant to the President , Dr Doyin Okupe has distanced himself from a caption of a news report which quoted him as saying the Federal government would borrow to finance the 2012 budget.<\/p>\n
Okupe who spoke with Pointblanknews.com today maintained that his take was that since part of the budget had deficit funding, part of it, and not all, would require some borrowing.
\nHe said \u201c the whole thing was misleading because I never said the 2012 would be funded through borrowing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Okupe referred to a quote in the report in the Punch where he said \u201c I want to bring up the fact there is a budget deficit of over N1 trillion in the budget\u2026the implication of which is that some part of the money required to fund the budget will be borrowed\u201d<\/p>\n
This came against the backdrop of the brouhaha between the Finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the House of Representatives, generated by the budget implementation.<\/p>\n
The House had on Wednesday branded Okonjo-Iweala a liar for claiming that 56 per cent of the budget had been implemented, whereas the figure from her ministry said as of July 2012, only 12.6 per cent had been achieved.<\/p>\n
According to Okupe \u201c I never said that there is no money to fund the budget. Some elements of the budget has deficit funding built in. By definition what this means is that part of the funding for the budget will require some borrowing.<\/p>\n
The Presidential spokesman stressed that that \u201cit doesn\u2019t make sense for the government to remain inflexible in its timeline for budget execution, to now go ahead and borrow money for MDAs while the MDAs still have outstanding and unused credit balances in their capital accounts with the CBN. This approach would be needlessly costly and run counter to prudent financial management.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce again i categorically restate that that at no instance in time did i say that there is no money to fund the Budget\u201d he said<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Senior Special Assistant to the President , Dr Doyin Okupe has distanced himself from a caption of a news report which quoted him as saying the Federal government would…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[78],"class_list":["post-2532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exclusive","tag-okupe"],"yoast_head":"\n