Buhari Reveals His Intentions Towards The Revised 2020 Budget

President Muhammadu Buhari will on Friday sign into law the revised 2020 budget passed by the National Assembly in June.

Mr Buhari’s personal assistant on new media, Bashr Ahmad, confirmed this on his Twitter handle in Abuja on Thursday.

The Senate and House of Representatives had on June 10 and June 11 respectively passed the revised 2020 budget of N10.8 trillion.

The Federal Executive Council (FEC) on May 13 approved a revised budget of N10.5 trillion.

The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, who disclosed this, said the Council approved the reduction of oil benchmark price from the initial 57 to 25 dollars per barrel, crude oil production from 2.18 million to 1.94 million per day.

She said: “The council has approved our recommendations and the approval has these key parameters.

“The crude oil price is approved at $25 per barrel, crude oil production is at 1.94 million barrels per day and then an exchange rate of N360 to $1.

“The revised budget is now in the total sum of N10.523 trillion, a difference of just about N71.5 billion when compared to the approved budget.

“This is because, as we cut down the size of the budget, we also have to bring in new expenditure previously not budgeted, to enable us adequately respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The federal government in this budget will have direct revenue of funding the budget of N5.158 billion. The deficit to this budget, N5.365 trillion and this will be financed by both domestic as well as foreign borrowing.

“The foreign borrowing we are doing for 2020 are all concessionary loans from the IMF, which has already been approved and has crystallised, from the World Bank, Islamic Development Bank as well as Afro EXZIM bank.

“There will also be some drawdown of previously committed loans for major ongoing projects that we will be drawing from both existing facilities as well as some special accounts with the approval of Mr. President and the National Assembly,’’ she said.

However, the legislators increased the budget from the initial N10.5 trillion submitted by President Buhari to N10.8 trillion.

The figure shows that the sum of about N2.5 trillion is for capital expenditure and recurrent non-debt expenditure rose to N4.9 trillion.

Others are N2.6 trillion for debt service and N2.9 trillion for sinking funds.