‘How govt’ll capture new minimum wage’

The Federal Government will prepare a supplementary budget to ensure the payment of the increased wage bill after the minimum wage review, Director General of the Budget Office Ben Akabueze said yesterday.

He spoke against the background of the ongoing wage review process and its effect on this year’s budget being considered by the National Assembly.

Akabueze said: “When an agreement is reached on the new minimum wage, the financial implications will be worked out and a supplementary budget prepared for its implementation.”

He added: “Right now, the only provision that exists is what we call public service wage adjustment and that is merely over N40 billion that has been made on that line, which means it would not be enough to cater for any adjustments that may be necessary.”

Speaking during a dialogue with the media and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in Abuja yesterday, Akabueze added that an arrangement was being worked on in respect of government departments generating revenue but not remitting to the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF).

He said:  ”Going forward, we are working to design and implement a new performance management framework for these MDAs and state owned enterprises that will see them contributing, we have refused to take the path of reducing the revenue projection from them.”

According to him: “in the 2016 budget, we projected a very ambitious N1.5 trillion naira for these agencies, by the time the year was over, we recorded less than 400 billion. In 2017 we took a hard look and realised that we are being overly ambitious and we reduced the projection to N807 billion, the full year fiscal numbers are not out and I know that there’s still a significant under performance.”

“For 2017 we put N847 billion and a number of people have questioned the rationale for that decision, but we think that it’s important to answer the question fundamentally whether N847 billion naira revenue projections from these agencies in which cumulatively government has invested about N40 trillion over the years and therefore a budget of N847 billion is simply asking for a two per cent return of investment, is not unreasonable. We chose to hold back on the target and to engage with these agencies to drive the performance and say this is not acceptable.”

He added that the N4.9 billion the federal government spends annually to maintain mechanical and electrical equipment in the Villa is not excessive.

“There is the annual N4.9 billion for maintenance of mechanical and electrical equipment in the Villa. The Villa as we all know is an expansive complex comprising residences, offices and other relevant support services and infrastructure as significant as N4.9 billion sounds, it’s not an excessive amount of money to keep those facilities in top shape.”

Defending other contentious items in the budget, Akabueze noted that regarding “some items classified as “unclear”, we concede that perhaps some of the item descriptions need improvement, we made efforts and some of our officers made contact with some MDAs, we reviewed and questioned some unclear descriptions and we made some push backs and the MDAs were made to clarify but it is quite conceivable that some of them still sound not very clear. If you come across such you can seek clarification from us or specific MDAs.”

Regarding the N2.2 billion social media mining suite which the DSS plans to execute under security protocols to curtail false information and what is called fake news, Akabueze said this amount in the 2018 budget was captured because false information or fake news as it is known globally now “could threaten national security and they have assured us that the intention is not to hinder freedom of speech and information.

According to the DG budget, “we have N338 million computer and software acquisition for the federal ministry of finance this is only to fund some ICT solutions this cannot be considered an excessive amount of money for the ministry of finance this is hardly $1 million.”

There have been allegations of inadequate provisions for some sectors such as health, education and agriculture Akabueze said the Budget Office in preparing the budget “conceded that we need to allocate more money as we go forward but the truth of the matter is that overall there is significant constraint in terms of availability of funding. We should be looking at a budget higher than N8.6 trillion. The estimate is that we need to be spending a minimum of $30 billion annually on infrastructure to actually make a significant dent on the infrastructure stock in the country.”

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