Speaking at a high level ministerial segment of the conference of ministers at the Africa Development Week organised by the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Zainab Ahmed, minister of state for budget and national planning, has said the Federal Government would implement the 2017 budget within 12 months, beginning from January 2017.
Ahmed expressed displeasure that the budget could not be implemented early enough, as “it is not a good thing that we cannot implement the budget at the beginning of the year.
“We know that we submitted late, but this is April and we are still waiting for the budget to come from the National Assembly. What we are doing going forward is that the 2017 budget at the last week of September, will be with the National Assembly.
“Hopefully, at the end of the year, all the processes would have been completed and the budget approved and by January we start implementing. This year is a transition year and we will try to manage the implementation as best as we can. So, come 2017, we hope to have 12 full months to implement the budget.”
The minister disclosed that the Federal Government planned to review its tax incentive policies and block all revenue leakages, saying that with the current decline in oil revenue, the government had begun to look towards non-oil sector to finance its programmes, which was why only 30 percent of the 2016 budget would be financed by the oil sector.
“We are also expanding our tax base. We are trying to bring as many people and organisations that are in the informal sector not paying tax to come into the tax net. We are also pulling back some of the waivers that we feel are absolutely unnecessary and are rather slowing down the economy and are simply a drain on our resources,” she said.
According to her, the Federal Government is trying to bring in revenue that was not properly harnessed from the government owned enterprises, which were before now making money and spending it with little or no returns to the government.
Responding to the country’s position of Agenda 2063 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), she said: “We are currently in the process of reviewing the long-time plan of the country, which is vision 2020. We are doing it in two stages.
“First of all, we are doing a successor plan, which is actually an implementation plan for four years, and in making the successor plan and the new long-term plan, which will be a 25-year plan, we are incorporating the implementations of the SDGs and the Agenda 2063.”
Reacting to tax incentive review by the government, Tunde Aremu, head of policy advocacy and campaign manager, Actionaid Nigeria, said if the government was looking at reviewing its tax policies, it should focus on tax concessions giving to multinationals.
“What Nigeria is already losing through the granting of tax incentives is an average of $2.9 billion every year. That is huge and unnecessary,” he said.
