Nigeria’s capital spending totals N138bn as at September as cash crunch bites

The Federal Government was only able to release about N138.08 billion for the first three quarters of the year till September 2015, due to revenue challenges brought about by softening oil prices, even though it managed to pay salaries and debt services.

The meager capital disbursement to the Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs), was out of the N557 billion budgeted for the year according to BusinessDay findings.

The Federal Government’s cumulative revenues as at September was N2.010 trillion out of the expected, N331.78 billion, short of prorated projections  due to shortfalls in both oil and non oil revenues.

In the Medium Term Expenditure framework (MTEF) approved last week by the National Assembly, government  said oil revenue, although lower than projected, continues to represent a major share in government revenue. Apart from price shocks, oil also saw output shocks, as average production was 21.3 mbpd between the first and third quarter of the year.

“The less than projected oil revenue is attributed to oil production shortfall, which resulted from several shut-ins of some wellhead platforms, as well as shutdown of some oil pipelines breeched by oil vandals,”

As also contained in the MTEF, the abuse of its waivers and incentives for key intermediate inputs geared towards boosting productive activities led to lower  non-oil revenues at N2.455  trillion as against N3.04755 trillion.

“Also, the decrease in the volume of imports, due to the naira depreciation against the US dollar and the restriction on foreign exchange allocation for the import of some items, contributed to the non-oil receipts ,particularly with respect to Nigeria Customs Service collections,” the document seen by BusinessDay stated.

But it was also learnt that the Buhari government refused to disburse capital expenditure for the first quarter, which former President Jonathan could not offset before he was ousted from power in the April elections.

Femi Adesina had confirmed to BusinessDay that Buhari’s administration released two quarters for this year, second and third quarters, released in September and October respectively.

He said “Jonathan’s administration owed the two last quarters for last year and first quarter for this year. All those are now forfeited as it was not rolled over.”

Onyinye Nwachukwu