Nigeria President, Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday wrote the National Assembly asking for an adjustment in the 2012 budget which he signed into law last Friday.
Mr Jonathan is seeking an upward review of allocations to the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and the Universal Basic Education (UBE), as their allocations under statutory transfers are usually calculated as a percentage of revenue accruing to the federal government. With the upward adjustment of the oil benchmark from $70 initially proposed, to $72 as passed by the National Assembly, shortfalls of N1.91 billion and N1.97 billion respectively has arisen in the budget of the two organizations.
The president also requested that a separate subhead be created for the Subsidy Re-investment Programme (SURE-P), to make it easier for the board to effectively perform their monitoring mandate.
On the Niger Delta amnesty programme, the president observed that the budget as passed appeared to have given priority to the cost of administering the implementation of the programme rather than the core aspects of it.
The 2012 Appropriation Bill was signed into law last Friday by Mr. Jonathan.
The budget has an aggregate expenditure of N4.69 trillion whilst the total federal government revenue forecast is N3.5 trillion based on a benchmark oil price of $72 per barrel.
N1.32 trillion is earmarked for capital expenditure and N3.4 trillion is budgeted for recurrent expenditure.
N890 billion has been set aside to fund the government’s reduced petroleum subsidy payments, while the N180 billion for the Subsidy Reinvestment Programme is be deducted from federal accounts.
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