WE'LL LESSEN BUDGET DELAYS IMPACT ON ECONOMY: ADEOSUN

The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has said the Federal Government will mitigate the negative impact of the delay in the implementation of the 2018 budget on the economy. She said this while responding to questions from journalists. The transcript of her response was sent to our correspondent by her Media Adviser, Oluyinka Akintunde, on Tuesday.

In recent times, there have been disagreements between the Executive and the National Assembly over the passage of annual budgets. For instance, in 2017, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo expressed disappointment over the inability of the National Assembly to pass that years budget in time despite the fact that it was sent by the Executive to the lawmakers in December of 2016.

The 2017 budget was not passed and assented to until June of last year. The same scenario played out with the 2018 budget, which was presented to both chambers of the National Assembly in November 2017 and only passed the test of legislative scrutiny in May of this year. Speaking on the delay in the passage of this years budget, Adeosun said the Federal Government would have to realign its priorities since five months had gone already. She stated, We remain optimistic about the budget. We have to realign our priorities since five months are gone already. What has helped us is that the 2017 budget was passed late last year and what we have done was to carry on with those projects. As you know, many of these projects are multi-year projects; so, hopefully, there wouldnt be too much disruption. Of course, there will be some and it will be insincere of me to say that the delay in the budget passage has no impact. It does because the cost of money in the markets changes and so, there will be some impact. But we are going to try and mitigate that impact as much as possible and focus on completing the projects.

The minister added that the Federal Government would make sure that many multi-year projects such as rail and power projects would continue to receive adequate funding from the government. She expressed optimism that the Federal Government would close the 2017 budget with capital expenditure in excess of N1.5tn, which is higher than the previous years figure of N1.3tn.

(Punch)