From bogus budget...

er revenue generating agencies decided to act on the provisions, they may decide not to collect duties and levies.”

In a similar vein, the Director of Finance, Nigeria Immigration Services, Professor Aba George, complained that the N400 billion the agency was supposed to generate as revenue this year is being cornered by a U.K.-based firm handling most of its outsourced services and operations, adding that, “contract on the outsourced services and operations given to the firm on behalf of NIS in 2003 gives government 33 percent of proceeds, Immigration seven percent, while the remaining 60 percent is cornered by the firm.” Professor George said, “This is our seventh time of tabling this complaint before the Senate or the House of Representatives; please rescue us from the hook of this firm.

“The contract was entered into without the knowledge of Immigration since 2003 and those behind it keep on renewing it and denying us about N400 billion revenue yearly. It is a rip-off and purely one-sided contract, bleeding Immigration and Nigeria financially,” George lamented.

These complaints galore point to the palpable revenue challenges facing the 2022 Appropriation Act. If these ‘traditional’ revenue-generating GOEs are fiscally handicapped and/or facing serious limitations or constraints arising from the Finance Act 2021 (which is supposed to guide their mandates), obviously the entire budget is imperilled. Already, it is almost certain that the N3 trillion revenue being expected from these agencies would turn out a forlorn hope. This scenario, without a doubt, leaves the Federal Government with the only window of internal and external borrowing to fund the budget. And, even this window is already taking the country irreversibly to the precipice of a debt trap. This is because, this year, it is estimated that the debt-to-revenue ratio would hit about 90 percent, especially as politicians fund their electioneering towards 2023 general polls.

Already, speculations are rife that much of government borrowings are going into funding recurrent expenditure rather than capital items. Indeed, part of the government’s plan is to more than double the non-debt recurrent expenditure to about N7 trillion in 2022, from just about N3.5 trillion in 2021—which vividly portrays lack of political will or fiscal discipline to control expenditures largely financed through borrowings.

Statistics show that as at September 2021, Nigeria’s total public debt stood at over N38 trillion (about $93 billion); yet, with unavoidable increased local borrowing this year, local debt alone by close of 2022 is projected to hit about N43 trillion—about 860 percent of government revenue, according to a report by Augusto & Co.—a firm of public finance and management consultants. So, in truth, the budget faces a double whammy, namely: poor funding and spiking public debt. What’s the way forward?