Presidency Maintains Accountibility in Government Finances

The Presidency has stoutly defended its handling of government finances since the inception of the present administration and stated that allegations of impropriety levelled against it by the Senate Public Accounts Committee are baseless and unfounded.

In a press release, which shredded all the allegations, the office of the President maintained that there was no over-expenditure in the year 2000 recurrent budget. Rather there was an unspent balance of N80.6 million, since out of the N19.256 billion budgeted, only N19.175 billion was spent.

The Presidency also rebunked the claim that some recovered looted funds were not paid into government coffers. It explained that though the National Assembly in Appropriation Act 2002 made a provision of N40.7 billion as income from Looted Fund Account, what was indeed available in the account was N29.2 billion. Therefore the allegation of a missing N11.5 billion did not arise in the first instance.

As for funding for capital projects, the office of the President insisted that capital projects can only be undertaken after all recurrent expenditures have been accommodated, especially personnel costs which is a first charge item on the account of the Federal Government.

Government also explained that the grant of $10 million to Niger Republic was not illegal since it was an additional commitment from the previous government, which was funded from recovered loot.

Concluding, the Presidency stated that though warrants for expenditure were issued on quarterly basis cash backings are released monthly only when revenue is received into the Federal Government Consolidated Revenue Fund. As an example, it pointed out that from January to May 2002 total Federal Government revenue was N236.62 billion whereas the projected expenditure was N280.77 billion indicating that the available revenue was not even sufficient to fund recurrent expenditure. It revealed that in the 2002 revenue profile the National Assembly overstated the expected revenue by N27.6 billion on two items namely proceeds from privatization and recovery of looted funds.

Bolaji Adebiyi
Nigeria Information Service Centre
June 20, 2002