THE Presidency has declared that former Vice President and People’s Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar’s criticism of 2019 Budget proposal was high on rhetoric and low on real solutions.
Abubakar had last weekend issued a statement in which he described President Muhammadu Buhari’s 2019 budget proposal as fundamentally flawed and failing to address current realities.
But, a statement by the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, said the “current realities” identified by Atiku were issues already highlighted in President Buhari’s budget speech and further amplified in the detailed presentation by Minister of Budget and National Planning Senator Udoma Udo Udoma.
According to Adesina, Abubakar regrettably didn’t offer substantive and workable solution to the identified “realities”.
He said: “Atiku describes the underlying assumptions of the budget as generous, wild and untenable, but does not propose alternative assumptions that would have been more appropriate.
“He argues that the economy is yet to recover from the 2016/2017 recession. Unfortunately, he cannot create his own definition of an economic recession, which is a technical term with a universally applicable meaning. When an economy experiences two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, it is said to be in recession and whenever it returns to positive GDP growth of whatever rate, it is said to have exited recession. It is doubtful if he understands the simple meaning of recession.
“Atiku attributes the sustained accretion to foreign reserves to “increases in international prices of Brent Crude and foreign borrowing.
“But he conveniently forgets that under the immediate past federal administration, oil prices were at an all-time high with substantial growth in foreign borrowings, and yet foreign reserves nose-dived from a peak of $62 billion to as low as $24 billion.
“His repeated reference to the price of Brent Crude throughout his statement may be indicative of his lack of knowledge that Nigeria’s Bonny Light Crude trades at a premium of at least $2 per barrel over the price of Brent; just as his reference to Nigeria’s OPEC quota may also suggest that he does not know that Condensates do not count in measuring compliance with the quota.”
Adesina added: “The PDP presidential candidate faults the provision of N305 billion for NNPC’s cost under-recovery on Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) but does not say exactly what he would do about PMS pricing.
“If, however, we are to go by an earlier statement from his campaign organisation, which promised to reduce the price of petrol to N87, then we can expect a much higher subsidy provision from an Atiku government; because he is not going to perform magic to get the refineries working at peak capacity immediately.
“He describes the 2019 budget as being very small, but does not offer any implementable options for improving domestic resource mobilisation, which is the only sustainable means to achieving larger budgets. It does seem that he does not understand or is just feigning ignorance about the critical role of revenue in budget preparation.
“A careful look at Atiku’s statement would show that there is nothing original about his identified “realities”. These are areas President Buhari had already identified in his speech. For instance, the President recognised that the revenue performance of the Federal Government up till September 2018 has been less than spectacular.
“Leaving aside for a moment the fact that there has been a remarkable increase in Federal Account receipts in the last three months, a look at the budget speech will show that the President specified a number of actions to tackle revenue weakness, including strengthening on-going efforts at tax collection, liquidation of recovered assets, immediate recovery of past due oil royalties charges and deployment of the National Trade Window to improve Customs collections.
“His most laughable criticism perhaps was his claim that ‘there is little evidence to show that increased investment in agriculture has yielded positive results’. Even the worst adversary of the Buhari administration would acknowledge that significant progress has been made in the agriculture sector.”
He said in Atiku’s often desperate attempt to rubbish the 2019 budget, he conflated foreign direct investment with capital inflows.
He said it was obvious that Atiku’s statement on the budget was a poor attempt at playing to the gallery.