FG Moves to Monitor Funds Generated by CBN, NNPC

By Dipo Olowookere

As a way of getting more money to use in reflating the economy, Federal Government has revealed that it will start planning to come up with a holistic budget in the future.

Speaking at an event in Abuja on Thursday, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, noted that the government will now be more prudent in the management of government revenues, stressing that the budget will now capture all the revenue generating agencies, especially the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), NDIC and NNPC.

The Minister said, “We are also trying to ensure compliance with the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The agencies that are still outside of government, their size of revenue is actually more than the federal budget.

“In fact, IMF did a survey which shows that it’s 120 percent, the size of our entire budget.

“So in other words, there is a parallel budget sitting outside the budget. The CBN, NDIC and NNPC; they sit outside the budget and we need to bring them in.

“They have to become more accountable and so we are working on that.

“The National Assembly has given us the support of ensuring that if these agencies do not submit their budget, they will not be able to pay anything other than salaries.

“These agencies were set up to be revenue generating for the government but they have become revenue generating for themselves; we need that money to come back into the central budget.”

She further said that the Federal Government was going to clear all backlog of payments owed to its contractors, going forward.

She attributed the high rate of non-performing loans in the banking industry to the huge contract sums owed by government to its contractors that had collected loans to finance these contracts.

“So, we are working with the CBN to issue a promissory note to clear the backlog. When we clear the backlog then we start afresh.

“If you get a government contract, these are your payment terms, and that will also give us lower pricing.

“What we have discovered is that because people feel that there is a risk that they may not be paid, they load the price of the contract,” she said.