Presidency Keeps Mum On Atiku’s Criticism Of FG’s Budget Cut

Today Sunday makes it the fourth day that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar gave his scathing criticism of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration’s decision to slash the 2020 budget by a meager N71.5 billion, which translates into 0.6%  of the total budget.

Buhari had in December 2019 signed the 2020 budget of N10,594,362,364,830 into law with the oil benchmark price set at $57 per barrel, but which had now fallen to about $20 per barrel.

But the ravages of the Coronavirus pandemic  have disrupted the global economy and countries are struggling to respond, including Nigeria which relies heavily on oil revenue that is now seriously threatened due to the crash in oil price.

In response, the Federal Executive Council  on Wednesday approved  a revised budget of 10.523 trillion, cutting a mere  N71.5 billion from the budget.

But the ex-vice president, in a Facebook post on Thursday, said the cut was “grossly insufficient” and berated the Buhari administration saying it had lost touch with the current realities in the global political economy. 

He said the 0.6% reduction in expenditure was unjustifiable in view of the fact that income from oil is expected to fall short by more than 50 %.

He stressed that Nigeria could not make up for the loss of expected revenue by taking out more loans and issuing out more bonds as the Buhari administration planned to do, warning that debt would kill the economy and put Nigerians in bondage.. 

He said the best way out of the economic quagmire was for the government to drastically cut its expenditure. 

“The billions budgeted for the travels and feeding of the President and Vice President has to be reduced. The ₦27 billion budget for the renovation of the National Assembly has to go. The massive budgets to run both the Presidency and the Legislature have to be downsized.

“The budget for purchasing luxury cars for the President, his vice, and other political office holders must be abandoned. Leave the salaries of civil servants alone, but reduce the salaries of political appointees. Sell 8 or 9 of the jets in the Presidential Air Fleet. 

“Any budget slash that is less than 25% will not be in the interest of Nigeria…,”Abubakar had stated.

But unlike the prompt response it had given to such criticisms, the Presidency had maintained silence on the latest attack from the former presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party in 2019.

No one in the administration has responded yet to the criticism of the budget cut.

THE WHISTLER called Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant on Media to the president, on Thursday but he didn’t pick his calls. Instead he sent a text asking the reporter to send him a text message, which was immediately done.

This website asked him to respond to Abubakar’s comments on the budget slash, but he never sent any  reply and didn’t call back.

It was the same with the minister of information, Lai Muhammed who also did not pick his calls and never replied the reporter’s text message.

But Oyinlola Olaniyi, a professor of Economics at the University of Abuja, who spoke to THE WHISTLER, said the presidency did not have to speak but someone whose job it is to manage the economy in the government ought to have responded to such criticism.

“This is democracy and the people deserve to ask questions and get answers, so I believe someone like the minister of finance should have responded.

But Olaniyi said he was not in a position to speak the way the former VP had spoken about the budget because “I have to see the new revenue profile of government to know how much has been cut and how much the government was expecting as income.”