Economic and financial analysts have urged the Federal Government to show empirical evidence backing up its claims that it had disbursed N1 trillion to federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies for capital projects in 2016.
The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, had disclosed the figure during an interactive exchange with members of the House of Representatives Tactical Committee on Recession in her office in Abuja.
The minister stated that the amount was released for various projects, including the commencement of the construction of a dual standard railway line that would link Lagos and Kano; rehabilitation of roads; expansion of irrigation facilities to boost agriculture and the upgrading of aviation infrastructure across the country.
But Managing Partner, DomainStandards Consult, Mr. Peter Adebayo, urged government to be transparent and accountable in its budget implementation process(es).
According to him, the performance of the budget in the preceding year should also be a great factor in the implementation of the budget of the succeeding year.
He said, “It is not enough for the government to tell us how much it spent on projects, we must also probe its claims. Let relevant ministries tell us how much they spent on each of the projects.
“At this time, government’s expenses and the progress, performance of the projects must be monitored at every point in time. So not only must we be interested in how these funds were released, the people in charge of the release must also be interested in how these funds were applied, because it is the application of funds that would determine the accountability.
“Nigerians must know how these funds have performed so far, so that if there is any gap, it will be used to guard against future occurrence in the subsequent implementation and budgetary system.
For me, it is not unlikely to trace the funds that the Federal Government has released. As a professional, I believe in empirical facts, so we should actually know the specific projects and amount of funds it had committed to them, through this analysis, we can measure performance and targets.”
A political economist, Prof. Pat Utomi, stated that though it is a good development, if the government had released such amount for capital projects, but it is also important to scrutinise and probe the claim, in order to avoid re-occurrence of certain issues.
“If we want to assess or confirm the development, all we need to do is to approach the necessary authorities, such as the Budget Office, to know how the funds were released and utilised. We can’t get the true situations of things if we don’t get necessary information from the relevant quarters and conduct some investigations,” he stated.
