The Minister of Budget and National Planning, Mr Udoma Udo-Udoma Monday in Abuja said the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework is in progress and will be submitted to the National Assembly for consideration by October.
Udo-Udoma made this declaration at a Stakeholders Consultative Forum with Civil Society Groups and organised private sector on the 2017-2019 Medium Term Expenditure Framework. He also said that the Federal Government has expended N2.1 trillion out of the N6.06 trillion approved budget for 2016 while only N253 billion of the N1.8 trillion earmarked for capital projects had been spent so far.
He said: “Demand and supply factors are expected to keep crude oil prices low in the medium term compared to the period prior to mid 2014.
“We are considering a conservative oil price benchmark of 42.5 dollar per barrel for 2017, 45 dollar per barrel in 2018 and 50 dollar per barrel in 2019.
“We estimate oil production to be 2.2 million barrel per day for 2017; 2.3 million barrel per day in 2018 and 2.4 million barrel per day for 2019.
“We have pegged exchange rate for 2017, 2018 and 2019 at N290 to a dollar.”
“A significant increase in non-oil revenue receipts is projected due to a gradually recovering domestic economy and government’s expected improvement in FIRS tax collection efforts.
He also talked about the revenue projection for the 2017-2019 MTEF.
“Company Income Tax is projected to increase from N1.79 trillion in 2016 to over N1.86 trillion in 2017 and beyond.
“VAT collections to increase by about 42.4 per cent 2017. Operating surpluses projection have been moderated downwards for 2017 and thereafter a modest growth.
“Customs collections are projected to moderated downwards for 2017 and thereafter a modest growth,” he said.
The Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice, Mr Eze Onyepere, also said that government should learn and build on the mistakes of the 2016 budget.
“We should draw lessons from the mistakes of the last budget. We have all seen that the revenue projections for 2016 were over optimistic.
“This is why we are finding it difficult to get money to fund the budget especially the capital expenditure.
“In 2017 onward, we should be more empirical in our revenue forecast. Let it be more realistic so that there won’t be a deviation of more than minus or plus five percent.
“This is because if we have more money, we can do supplementary budgets rather than have an overly optimistic revenue projections and at the end of the day we are not able to fund our budget,” he said.
