2023 Budget, Impracticable – Says Senator Ibezim | READ WHY

The senator representing the Imo North Senatorial district, Senator Chukwuma Frank Ibezim says the 2023 budget proposed by President Muhammadu Buhari is impracticable because the parameters used by the government are wrong.

With the presentation of the 2023 Appropriation Bill, President Muhammadu Buhari may have set the tone for another unrewarding yearly ritual that ends up draining public finances and adds nothing significant to the economy.

This is because, according to finance experts, for the umpteenth time, the Appropriation Bill has been filled with spurious assumptions and unrealistic targets.

President Buhari had presented a spending proposal of N20.52 trillion to the National Assembly for consideration, describing the appropriation as a ‘Budget of Fiscal Consolidation and Transition.’

Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have downgraded growth prospects amid rising headwinds and rising interest rates across the globe. Nigeria has seen the benchmark interest rate rise from 11.5 per cent to 15.5 per cent since May as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) struggles to rein in inflation and stem possible massive fund outflow due to monetary normalisation in the United States and other advanced economies.

Ibezim made this assertions while speaking with some journalists today, he pointed out that Nigeria budgeting system that always rely on the exchange rate of dollar makes it faulty, “the issue of foreign exchange is already a challenge when your budget is based on another person’s currency. So, it means that you’re going to rely on what happens with that currency.

“It’s also another big issue when the natural products that you’re endowed with, a benchmark you rely on, you find out that at the end of the day that you’re not even able to produce the quota that you’ve been given.

“The large scale and massive stealing of our oil, is concerning, as this reduces drastically the revenues available to the Government”

With conflicting figures, projections have put our losses from this malaise at between 700,000 to 900,000 barrels of crude Oil per day, leading to about 29 to 35 per cent loss in Oil revenue in the first quarter of 2022.

Speaking further, Ibezim suggests that budgeting should include stakeholders from different fields of the economy “As far as I know, our style of budgeting ought to be, for instance, you know the number of roads that you need to build, you calculate how much you’ve agreed with professionals in that field to do the work. Then you ask those professionals that are in business what they need. So all you need to do in a budget is not just to release the monies to them, but to give them guarantees and tell them that if they get to each milestone, you’re paid automatically” he said.