A TRANSCRIPT OF THE SPEECH OF DR. NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA AT THE BUDGET 2014 PRESENTATION HELD AT TRANSCORP HILTON, ABUJA
ON MONDAY, JANUARY 20, 2014
Good morning and thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.
Honourable Ministers, my colleagues from the ministries of Works, Power and Women Affairs; Honourable Chair of the House Committee on Appropriations; the Deputy Chair of the House Committee on Appropriations; senior government officials; Special Adviser to the President on Performance Monitoring; Permanent Secretaries; Distinguished DGs and heads of organisations.
I am happy to see the Auditor General; he is joining us here today as well as the Accountant General; and we have so many heads of parastatals and other government agencies.
The Customs, thank you for coming also and joining us.
Donor partners, thank you. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen from civil societies and the private sector, as well as ladies and gentlemen of the press. It is really my honour to welcome you all to the public presentation of 2014 Federal Government budget proposal.
Today, the speech I'm going to give – I have to crave your indulgence – is going to be a little bit longer than usual because of what was described by the Country Director of the World Bank and all of us and the Honourable Chair of the House Committee: I laid the budget, we did not have the usual budget speech of Mr. President, so I want to take the time to lay out some of the key parameters of this budget. So I just want to alert you ahead of time that it will be a little bit more detailed or longer than usual.
I want to start by expressing my profound appreciation to His Excellency, President Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo under whose guidance the 2014 budget was prepared. I also thank the leadership of the National Assembly, the Chairs of the Finance and Appropriations committees of the Senate and the House. And I particularly want to thank the Honourable Chair of the Appropriations Committee and his deputy for spending time with us here today; also the other Honourable Ministers who are here present.
I thank my cabinet colleagues for their support, their understanding; and my three colleague ministers who are here today whose work is very important to the achievement of the objectives of the Budget 2014 and even the implementation of 2013 budget – the Honourable Ministers of Power, Works and Women Affairs. We have to work under a very tight timetable and constricted budget; yet they did the best they could to deliver with their teams. Thank you.
I acknowledge the efforts of all other relevant stakeholders and especially the staff of the budget office of the federation for their hard work in preparing this budget. Please give them a round of applause. It goes without saying that due to some of the constraints along the way, during this budget preparation there were many sleepless nights and 24 hours working in order to get the budget delivered. I render my sincere thanks to them all.
Now before I discuss the contents of the budget, please permit me to take a few minutes to make some introductory comments which I think will provide the context for the rest of the budget speech today. Before I do that, I also want to point to you that you will be given – if you haven't got them already – several important documents. First is Understanding Budget 2014, the next is The Citizen's Guide to the Budget, so it makes the budget simple; and we'll also be distributing, due to popular demand, answers to the 50 questions. We got many messages saying that people would like us to distribute it at this forum; so we'll try. We may not have enough copies because we were not really preparing to do that. So we've only got a few but we'll do the best we can.
Now, the first thing I want to address is, What is the budget all about? We've heard many comments about the budget. We've called it a budget for inclusive growth and job creation. And people have pointed: "How can they say they are creating jobs when only "x" amount has been allocated to this sector and it's not enough?" I want to state that the budget is not simply a set of revenue and expenditure plans by government. Rather, the budget is a statement about government's fiscal policies and related policies which are intended to move the economy forward. The budget is not only about the resources being allocated to various sectors, but also about new fiscal policies which will stimulate growth across various parts of the economy.
For example, in previous budgets we've announced measures such as backward integration policies to support various Agriculture Value Chains such as rice and sugar; and to support Industrial Value Chains such as cement, to support the development of the Solid Mineral Sector and so on. So when you look you often find that the impact of these policies may give resources – and I will illustrate this as we go along with this speech – they make resources available to the sector that are ten times the amount that is seen within the budget.
The government uses the budget process as an occasion to launch policies that can leverage significant resources outside of the budget to help grow the economy, create jobs, and put supportive policies in place that are to the benefit of Nigerians. I wanted to really mention that point. In this regard, I want to add that a whole set of industrial incentive policies which in Nigeria are typically called waivers and exemptions are a deliberate act of government policy. And these are the policies that have underpinned the expansion that I spoke about in the cement, the sugar and other industries; and enabled the creation of jobs.
These policies can amount to significant amounts of money in billions of naira but they are what enable our manufacturing industries in particular to be competitive; to be able to expand in an era where they may face constraints on their competition and production and thereby to create jobs. So job creation is linked very much to these policies of government. And I want to say that people need to understand this because at some stages, you know, these policies are not well understood, and some people think these are policies that lead to fraud.Read More
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