The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has described the 2019 budget proposed by President Muhammadu Buhari as “fundamentally flawed.”
In an article sent to Premium Times by his office, Abubakar said the budget proposal “deliberately ignores and fails to address current realities.”
Recall that Buhari presented the N8.83 trillion budget proposal to the National Assembly last week. Abubakar, however, questions the budget and its foundations.
“The 2019 budget is built on very shaky foundation and makes very generous, often wild and untenable assumptions which pose significant risks to its implementation,” the opposition candidate says.
Read his full statement below.
By Atiku Abubakar
President Muhammadu Buhari presented the 2019 Budget Proposals to the Joint Session of the National Assembly on Wednesday 20 December 2018. Its key aim is to, according to the President, ‘further place the economy on the path of inclusive, diversified and sustainable growth in order to continue to lift significant numbers of our citizens out of poverty’. The 2019 Appropriation Bill proposes an aggregate expenditure of N8.83 trillion for the year of which N4.04 trillion is recurrent, N2.31 trillion capital and N2.14 trillion will be devoted to debt service. The planned spending is lower than the 2018 budget by N300 billion. Allowing for 11% inflation rate, its real value is N7.95 trillion.
The proposed budget as presented is fundamentally flawed. It deliberately ignores and fails to address current realities and pretends, as Mr. President asserts, ‘we are on the right direction’. On the contrary, the 2019 budget is built on very shaky foundation and makes very generous, often wild and untenable assumptions which pose significant risks to its implementation. It will be a disservice to the country if we ignore these fundamental flaws.
Several inaccurate claims litter the budget document – all, I think, in an attempt for Mr. President to whitewash the regime and hide their monumental failure to improve, even minimally, the welfare and living standards of much of the population. I see the rhetoric of ‘inclusive, diversified and sustainable growth’ as no more than an amplification of the APC-led government’s renewed propaganda to hoodwink the citizens into believing that there is ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.
