The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Beta Edu, said on Tuesday that the 2024 budget to fight poverty in the country was too small and would achieve limited results.
The Minister and heads of agencies under the ministry appeared before the Joint National Assembly Committee of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation in Abuja to defend the proposals.
She told the committee, chaired by Senator Idiat Adebule that the Budget Office allocated an overhead ceiling of N532.5billion to the ministry, explaining that this represented a 28% increase over the votes for 2023 to cushion the effects of inflation.
However, Edu stated that the 28% increase in the overhead ceiling was not commensurate with the 27.33% inflationary trend in the country.
She also said the capital budget ceiling was reduced from N3.7bn in 2022 to N1.3bn in 2023, representing a 71% reduction.
She noted that, while in the 2024 budget, the capital ceiling was slightly raised to N1.5bn, “it does not in any way match the mandate of the ministry’s headquarters in order to shrink poverty in Nigeria.”
Leave a Reply