2023 Budget: Finance Minister explains N206bn ‘insertion’

The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Hajiya Zainab Ahmed, has given explanation on the N206 billion allegedly inserted into the 2023 budget of Ministry Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management.

Ahmed said the item was wrongly coded by the Budget Office.

The N206,242,395,000 is for the National Social Safety Nets Project, which is domiciled in the ministry.

The World Bank is the funding sources for the project.

The minister spoke on Tuesday during an investigative hearing by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriation on alleged budget insertion of N206 billion in the 2023 budget of the ministry in Abuja.

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She added that the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management should have called the attention of the budget office to the anomaly like her counterparts in other ministries.

She said the Ministry of Defence, and Federal Ministry of Power among others also committed same error.

The minister called for collaboration among Ministries Department and Agencies of Government (MDAs) in a bid to forestall such oversight.

She said: “The project was correctly described in the submission in the 2023 budget, but unfortunately the Budget Office used wrong code.”

She said this resulted in it being captured as “Purchase of Security Equipment” in the budget preparation system.

She added that the budget preparation had a limited range of encoded programme and project description

Speaking on the insertion, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management, represented by the Permanent Secretary of the ministry, Dr. Nasir Gwarzo, said “she did not understand the budget code, it was the media that reported the error as padding.”

“We did not go to the media refuting the work the committee or the Ministry of Finance have done, but we wrote for clarification which was given.

“The amount of money in question was a counterpart funding that was given by the World Bank, if it was done without appropriation, Nigerian would not have known what was borrowed,” Gwarzo said.

In their response the members of the Committee, Rep. Igariwey Enwo (PDP-Ebonyi) and the Deputy Chairman, Appropriation said the budget should not be subjected to controversy.

“We are talking about money we borrowed, we should also know how we spend the money.

“Raising unnecessary controversy about the budget will not augur well. There should be inter agency coordination,” Enwo said.

The Star