2016 budget: Presidency mulls monitoring team to halt looting, enforce implementation

In a deliberate move to ensure effective implementation of this year’s budget and prevent looting of funds, the Presidency plans to engage the services of experts in the area of monitoring and evaluation, M&E, to track the implementation.

 

  A top Presidency official told us, last night, that President Muhammadu Buhari did not want the current budget to be messed up like previous ones and was, therefore, determined to take whatever measure was necessary to make it work in the interest of Nigerians.

The official said the Presidency had learned bitter lessons from recent events which had plagued national budgets and retarded national development and was determined to adopt stringent measures to block such leakages.

The official said the M&E team might be domiciled in the Budget and National Planning Ministry which falls under the purview of the Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, who heads the National Economic Team under the Presidency.

“The aim is to make the M&E to have a robust check on the way the budget is implemented so as to deliver the change which the present administration promised Nigerians,” the official said.

 learned that given the importance which the Presidency attaches to the full implementation of the budget, the team might be put in place as soon as Buhari returns to Abuja from his official trip to the United Kingdom this week.

Giving an idea of how the change agenda would be driven, the Presidency official explained that the government planned to give priority attention to the provision of critical infrastructure to diversify the economy and take care of the needs of Nigerians.

The top official disclosed that as result of the drive, all the key national projects in the budget that were removed by the National Assembly, causing a spat with the Presidency, had been fully restored in the budget signed into law by President Buhari last Friday.

Top on the list of the restored projects are the Calabar-Lagos Coastal Railway with a vote of N60 billion counterpart funding. The project is to be funded by huge cash from the Chinese government.

 we also learned that the Odukpani-Itu-Ikot Ekpene-Aba highway, which vote was reduced from N6 billion to N1.8 billion, had been restored and that the the project would take off this year.