FEC okays N895bn supplementary budget for military, COVID-19 vaccines

The Federal Executive Council has approved the draft 2021 supplementary budget of N895,842,462,917 for the purchase of military equipment and COVID-19 vaccines.

This was disclosed to reporters on Wednesday by the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, after the week’s FEC meeting in Abuja.

According to her, the draft contains N770.60bn to further enhance the capacity of the defence and the security agencies to address current and emerging security challenges in Nigeria; while N83.56bn has been set aside for COVID-19 vaccine programme, covering 30 million vaccines from Johnson and Johnson and the logistics costs related to the deployment of the vaccines.

She said, “It also contains the sum of N1.69bn for the Nigeria Comprehensive AIDS Programme that is currently operating in the states and an additional contingency provision of N40bn under the public service-wide adjustments to take care of the needs for allowances to the health sector, to the education sector and other wage related issues. This is an incremental provision over N100bn already provided in the 2021 budget.

“In line with this approval, we’ve also been given approval to draw down on some existing World Bank loans totaling about N39.58bn as part of the financing source for this supplementary budget.

“We’ll be working with the World Bank to restructure some of the existing facilities to realise this N39.58bn. We’ve also been given approval to withdraw N135bn from some special reserve levy accounts to part-fund this supplementary budget, but specifically related to COVID-19 vaccine, salaries and other health-related expenditure as well as the recurrent component of the Defense and Security expenditures.

“Finally, this approval also contains an approval to borrow the sum of N722.53bn for security expenditures and these are the capital components of the security expenditure in the absence of any other additional supplementary sources of borrowing. This borrowing would be done from the domestic international capital market.”