Dr Bright Okogwu, Director-General, Budget Office of the Federation, and the Accountant General of the Federation (AGF), Mr Jonah Ogunniyi Otunla, have both acknowledged that Nigeria is cash-strapped but not broke.
The duo made the declaration in Abuja, on Tuesday, while speaking at a meeting with federal revenue generating agencies, organised by the National Assembly Joint Committee on Finance and Appropriation.
The committee had organised the meeting to consider the 2012-2014 Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) earlier forwarded to the National Assembly by President Goodluck Jonathan, preparatory to the 2014 budget presentation in November.
According to Otunla, “Nigeria is not broke, but it is currently having cash flow problems. We may have cash flow problem, but we are not broke.
“Countries like Greek and Spain are broke, they are now approaching their international neighbours for bail out, but Nigeria has not done that and we are nowhere near that situation.”
Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mrs Maria Alade, who represented the governor, Mallam Lamido Sanusi, at the joint sitting, said since the AGF and the DG of the Budget Office had said Nigeria was not broke, that was also the position of the CBN.
“As bankers of the Federal Government, it is not our duty to tell the nation whether it is broke or not. But we can tell the amount in accounts at anytime,” she said.
However, the Ministry of Defence is broke, owing to limited budgetary allocation and arbitrary reduction of proposed budgetary appropriation by the Budget Office of the Federation, which has left the ministry with liabilities and unpaid debts.
The Permanent Secretary in the ministry, Aliyu Ismaila, disclosed this on Tuesday, during the visit of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, Bukar Goni Aji and the Peer Review Team of Permanent Secretaries, at the Ministry of Defence headquarters in Abuja, to assess their level of implementation.
The permanent secretary said there was the need to reconsider the importance and strategic role of the ministry, by increasing capital and overhead allocations.
According to him, over N19 billion was approved for the ministry in the 2013 appropriation, adding that so far, only about N13 billion had been released.
He explained that the ministry was burdened with over N194 million unpaid hotel bills, N14 million outstanding burial and death expenses and over N108 million outstanding repatriation allowance.
Aji, in his remark, noted that the Peer Review was to understand the feeling of staff, through the union headship and an assessment of the performance of the permanent secretaries.
He disclosed that the issue of ghost workers would be resolved with the implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS), which, he said, would solve delays in the payment of salaries.
Aji said the Federal Government was working to complete the IPPIS exercise and capture all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) by February 2014.
