Senate passes 2015 budget without provision for fuel subsidy

The Senate on Tuesday, passed  N4.493tr budget for the 2015 fiscal year, about five months after it

was presented by the Minister of Finance/Coordinating Minister for the Economy,  Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The national budget, which was earlier passed by the House of Representatives last week, was N51bn higher than the N4.425tr submitted to both chambers of the National Assembly by the federal government.

The senate approval of the budget on Tuesday, however confirmed the non inclusion of fuel subsidy provision in the document but contained N21bn for the funding of the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme.

The senate, in passing the budget, slightly reduced the N2.607, 601, 000, 300 proposed by the executive to N2.607, 132,491,708 as recurrent expenditure and simultaneously scaled down the capital expenditure from N642,848,999,699 estimated in the proposal to N556,995,465,449.

The Chairman, Joint Senate Committee on Appropriation and Finance, Mohammed Maccido, explained that the details of the figure approved by senate in the document were not different from the version passed by the House of Representatives last week.

He confirmed that the executive did not make provision for subsidy in the 2015 budget and that the National Assembly left it the way it was presented.

He said, “There was no provision in the budget for subsidy but I believe there should be provision for it especially since there was already, a disagreement between the oil marketers and the federal government over subsidy payment.”

He added that the budget will be driven by $53 oil benchmark, an exchange rate of N190.00 to one dollar;  2.2782m per barrel crude oil production per day; and deficit gross domestic product of -1.12 per cent.

Reacting to the development, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Ahmad Lawan, said the incoming government would definitely review the 2015 fiscal budget because of the various flaws in it.

He said, “The constitutional provision is that we should have even passed the budget before now but due to the exigencies of this period, we have just passed it and we have done our constitutional duty very well.