The Centre for Promotion of Private Enterprise has said that the Federal Government’s N17.1trn budget for next year will be difficult to fund, describing it as “too ambitious”.
The Chief Executive Officer, CPPE, Dr Muda Yusuf, said this on Wednesday at a press briefing in Lagos, titled ‘The economy and business environment in 2021 and an agenda for 2022’.
According to him, the 2022 budget is not reflective of the country’s present economic reality and will further plunge Nigeria into more borrowing that will exacerbate an already alarming debt profile.
He said, “Even with the original budget, we are talking of a deficit of over N6tn; and even with that, 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. The borrowing is likely to increase because we are going into the last lap of the administration.”
“I’m not sure it will be easy to fund this budget. It’s 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 sure 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 look at the actual to what was budgeted, there is always a huge gap. For me, this budget will be difficult to fund, so we mustn’t create problems for those who are releasing funds.”
