President Buhari earmarks N500bn for social welfare after he distance himself for Social Media Bill

The President has earmarked on N500billion in the 2016 budget for   social welfare intervention programmes that will capture school feeding, conditional cash transfer to vulnerable persons and post-NYSC grant. The programmes are coming on board at a time when the N5,000 campaign promise of the All Progressives Congress (APC)  is generating reactions. Buhari through is Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) for 2016, 2017 and 2018 and Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP) forwarded to the National Assembly yesterday said the amount had been captured in next year’s budget. 

 

He Said;

“N500billion has been provisioned in the 2016 budget as social investments for these programmes. These interventions will start as a pilot scheme and work towards securing the support of donor agencies and our development partners in order to minimise potential risks,”
“Government will institute policies to ensure that our students learn skills, provide funds and equipment upon graduation. This will be supported by a post-NYSC scheme,”
“To that extent, a budget size of N6.04tr is being processed, and federal government’s revenue is projected at N3.82tr implying a projected deficit of N2.22tr. The ratio of capital to recurrent expenditure is envisaged to move from the current 16/84 to 30/70 in 2016,”

The sum of N39.88bn was earmarked for Frontier Exploration Services in next year’s budget against the N19bn earmarked for same purpose in 2015 budget. Item number 227 on the budget breakdown tagged ‘recoveries of misappropriated funds’ was calculated to be N350.33bn. 

The total debt stock of the country as contained in the MTEF was put at N12.11tr as at June 2015. 
“Of this sum, the FGN was responsible for 82.98 while the 36 states and FCT accounted for the balance of 17.02 percent. The total debt is comprised of external debt stock of N2.03tr and domestic debt stock of N10.9tr,” he said.