The House of Representatives on Sunday expressed dissatisfaction with the implementation of the 2013 budget, saying that it was “still below expectations.”
The House suspended its plenary on Tuesday last week to allow its standing committees to proceed on their oversight functions by assessing the level of implementation of the budget.
The oversight tour will last till October 2.
However, the legislature stated that preliminary reports indicated that project implementation was not progressing in commensurate pace with the funds the executive arms of government claimed to have released so far.
It said capital projects executed by many Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Federal Government were scoring between 35-40 per cent, barely three months to the end the year.
“The performance is still below expectation.
“I have been on oversight visit with a number of committees and I must tell you that what we saw on ground was below expectation.
“This boils down to the same complaint of lack of funds they have been talking about.
“But, you ask yourself, what has happened to all the funds they said they have released?
“The Minister (of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) may be talking about appropriated funds, not actual releases.
“They mix these things up just to confuse Nigerians.
“The minister should be explicit with her explanations,” the Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Mr. Zakari Mohammed, told The PUNCH in Abuja.
Mohammed added that all the committees were expected to submit the reports of their findings before the House would take a final position on the matter ahead of the presentation of the 2014 budget estimates by President Goodluck Jonathan to the legislature.
But, Okonjo-Iweala had stated on September 18 that the MDAs had posted 76 per cent utilisation of the funds released to them.
She said so far, government had released a total of N850bn to the MDAs.
Meanwhile, the deputy General Secretary of the Non-Academic Staff of Educational and Associated Institution, Adetunji Ademisoye, has identified persistent slow growth in bank credit, non-budget performance, rising public domestic debt profile, unemployment and insecurity as the major threats confronting sustainable economic development in Nigeria.
Ademisoye said this while delivering a paper titled, “The Nigerian Economy: Challenges and Prospects for Sustainable Development,” during a seminar organised by the Oyo State chapter of the Institute of Chartered Economist of Nigeria in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, on Sunday.
He also said that Nigeria’s economy experienced respectable Gross Domestic Product growth rates, averaging over 6.5 per cent between 2006 and 2012, but the growth did not produce corresponding employment opportunities.
Punch
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