Emergency FEC Meeting Deliberates 2014 To 2016 Budgets - Maku

Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, said the special Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, summoned by President Goodluck Jonathan on Friday, discussed the fiscal strategy paper for the 2014 to 2016 appropriation years.

Maku disclosed this while briefing State House correspondents after the meeting held at the council chamber of the presidential villa.

It will be recalled that President Jonathan had summoned the emergency meeting two days after the usual Wednesday weekly FEC meeting.

Maku said that the special council meeting solely deliberated on the medium term fiscal framework and the fiscal strategy paper for 2014 to 2016 appropriation years.

For all this period since we came, we have been discussing the medium term fiscal strategy paper forwarded to us by the Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

The idea of bringing this to FEC was for us to intensively discuss the budget forecast for the year between 2014 and 2016 and also to look critically into the revenue and expenditure for these years.

It is an elaborate policy paper that was brought to us and we started debating on it to see that the budgets between now and 2016 realised the objective of growing the GDP.

It will also help in stabilising the macro-economic environment which has ensured that Nigeria remains the fastest growing economy in the continent as well as the destination for the inflow of foreign investments into the continent.

So, we are looking at the budget objective, budget policy and the direction that we want the economy to go and how it can impact on the welfare and well-being of the people of Nigeria,’’ he said.

Maku stressed that the objective was to ensure that the budget for the next two years would consolidate what the president had achieved in the first two years.

He said the council also wanted to ensure that the 2014 budget, like that of last year, came early.The early passage of the budget will also improve execution.

Last year, it was October, so, this year, we are hoping to keep the momentum of early passage of the budget,’’ he said.