By Elizabeth Adegbesan

The  Chief Executive Officer, Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE), Muda Yussuf, has said the Federal Government (FG) won’t be able to fund the 2022 budget of N17.1 trillion due to its unending problem with revenue generation.

The National Assembly has just  passed the 2022 Appropriation Act, raising the budget size to N17.126 trillion from the N16.391 trillion presented by President Muhammadu Buhari.

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Speaking at a CPPE  press conference on business environment in Lagos, Yusuf, the immediate past Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, LCCI, said: “Even with the original budget we are talking about a deficit of over N6 trillion and many people expect that the deficit will even go higher than that. Because every now and then we are being told that the government has a revenue problem.

“Look at the rate at which we are borrowing. And the borrowing is going to increase because we are going to the last lap of the administration. Now the budget has been jacked up.”

He expressed concern on the effect of raising the 2022 budget noting that it will increase FG borrowing, debt and deficit, causing problems for those releasing funds which will result in corruption.  

“My concern, first, it is too ambitious a budget.  Secondly, there is no political will to deal with the issue of expenditure because we are just throwing everything into it as if we have to make it so that everybody is happy and yet we don’t   have the capacity to fund it. That is why at the end of each budget year, when you relate the actual to what was budgeted, it is always a huge gap. When you relate the appropriation to the releases sometimes some agencies will tell you they got about 20 per cent of releases. There is always a wide gap.  

“Then there is also the risk of increasing the deficit and then borrowing which will further compound the fiscal situation that we have and the debt sustainability problem that we have.”