President Muhammadu Buhari will on Friday present N19.76 trillion, 2023 Budget to the National Assembly in Abuja.
The presentation will take place 10am at the temporary chamber of House of Representatives, according to reports.
However, Director General, Budget Office of the Federation, Ben Akabueze, had said the President will present the 2023 appropriation to the National Assembly in September.
He said the 2023 budget was prepared in tandem with extant Federal Government policies and guidelines as articulated in the 2023 Budget Call Circular and other relevant laws and regulations.
Buhari had in December 2021 signed the 2022 Appropriation Bill into law with an aggregate expenditures of N17.127 trillion, an increase of N735.85 billion over the initial Executive Proposal for a total expenditure of N16.391 trillion.
The Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, had disclosed that the federal government will borrow over N11 trillion and sell national assets to finance the budget deficit in 2023.
The budget deficit, she said, will exceed N12.42 trillion, should it keep the petroleum subsidy for the entire 2023 fiscal cycle.
She proposed two options for the lawmakers to consider for the 2023 budget.
First, the deficit is projected to be N12.41 trillion in 2023, up from N7.35 trillion budgeted in 2022, representing 196 per cent of total revenue or 5.50 per cent of the estimated GDP. In this option, she said, the government would spend N6.72 trillion.
The second option, she explained, involves keeping subsidy till June 2023 and this scenario will take the deficit to N11.30 trillion, which is 5.01 per cent of the estimated GDP. In this option, the PMS subsidy is projected to gulp N3.3 trillion.
The federal government already plans to spend N18.6 billion daily on PMS. The two proposals have budget deficits far above the stipulated threshold in the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
