President Muhammadu Buhari presented the 2016 budget as presented to a joint session of the National Assembly today, December 22. Speaking to Channels TV, some ministers shared their views on the implementation of the budget and their expectations. Reacting to the 2016 budget, Udoma Udo Udoma, the minister of budget and national planning said it’s an infrastructure and a job budget which highly considered the need to increase the investment on infrastructure as a way to revive the economy.
According to him, the implementation of the 2016 budget would be different as there is a new budget planning and implementation strategy designed to ensure constant monitoring on a monthly basis.
On his part, Kayode Fayemi, the minister of solid minerals said: “We are already diversified in terms of GDP. Oil only accounts for about 12% of the GDP but it accounts for the bulk of the revenue and that is where the challenge is.
“So we need to start driving the revenue in the direction of Agriculture, solid minerals, communications and other non-oil sectors so that we would have a much more realistic job creating, revenue generating economy.”
Fayemi reacts to 2016 budget presentation
Audu Ogbe, the minister of agriculture promised that there would be “increased support in seed, training, extension services, post-harvest management and bigger overseas market for their produce.”
According to him, two things excites him about the budget and they are; the job issue for young people and the return of teacher training colleges in the local governments.
“That is probably the biggest change that this government has announced and Nigerians will see the difference,” he said.
In his own reaction, Chris Ngige, the minister of labour and employment said Nigerians should expect jobs and more jobs.
He explained that the 2016 budget was an intervention budget for job creation.
Ngige reacts to 2016 budget presentation.
Ngige said: “There are so many programmes that will run under them but all of them will end up being for job creation, giving employment.
“We will give employment that will be decent. For example, one of the programmes we are going to execute is the conversion of graduates into the teaching cadre. We’ll give them training after Youth Corps, 1-year post Youth Corps, 2-year post Youth Corps, that is the bar and we will start form there; get them into teaching.”
He however, advised Nigerian youths to get technical skills so as not to be jobless.
The 6.07 trillion naira budget proposal for 2016 was predicated on $38 per barrel oil benchmark at the 197 naira exchange rate.
This is an increase of about 40 per cent from the previous budget of 4.357 trillion naira which was presented to the National Assembly in 2014 by the administration of former president, Goodluck Jonathan.