About two months after President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the Appropriation Act, the federal government may begin the release of funds for the implementation of the capital component of the N9.12 trillion 2018 budget this week. The 2018 budget provides N2.01 trillion for debt service, N3.51 trillion for recurrent expenditure and N2.87 trillion for capital expenditure, an increase over the N2.36 trillion provisioned for 2017.
Feelers indicate that the monetary committee of the Ministry of Finance, which is saddled with the responsibility of releasing funds to various ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), is meeting to take stock and decide on the first tranche of the capital vote to be released this week.
A top government official told THISDAY that besides procurement issues, the major cause of the delay in commencing the release of the capital vote centred on the recurring controversy over the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) vis-à-vis remittances by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into the Federation Account.
Remittances by the NNPC had ignited a major disagreement among the FAAC members, with the 36 states of the federation represented by their commissioners for finance refusing to share May and June allocations until issues around an acceptable template by the NNPC were resolved.
(ThisDay)
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