FG begins training of 4,250 personnel to prepare 2018 budget

THE Federal Government has revealed that it has commenced the preparation process of 2018 budget as a means to ensure that Nigeria economy is revived and placed on the path of sustainable growth.

Disclosing this in Abuja on Monday, the Director General, Budget office of Federation, Ben Akabueze stated that over 4,250 personnel involve in budget preparation from 800 Federal Government MDAs across the country will be train.

Ben who declared open Government Integrated Financial Management information System (GIFMIS) budget training in Abuja noted that the main goal of the training is to equip the nominated personnel with knowledge, skills and the tools they require to prepare and submit the 2018 budget on time.

“In week one, we shall be training over 1830 participants in Abuja. The participants being trained in Abuja are drawn from the FCT and the North Central geopolitical Zone except Kwara State where their participants will be going to Ibadan due to proximity. Participants from the other Zones will be trained in Kaduna, Gombe, Uyo, Enugu, Lagos and Ibadan”.

He said the present administration had adopted the Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) methodology to help ensure more optimal utilisation of government resources on projects, enhance the level of accountability and facilitate monitoring and evaluation of capital projects.

“To improve the quality of our budgeting process, we are committed to making the most use of technology and automation tools. For the 2017 Budget, MDAs prepared and submitted their budget online and in real time using a ZBB compliant web based application. It was the first time that MDAs were using an online system to prepare and submit their budget with no manual intervention” stated the DG.

He said for the 2018 budget, “we intend to improve on the experiences of the 2017 budget preparation process. Based on the feedback from the 2017 budget preparation, we have simplified the ZBB structure. Programmes and Sub-Programmes have been merged into Programmes and Activities and Sub-Activities have been merged into Activities and mapped to the GIFMIS structure to enable us use the Budget Preparation Subsystem on the GIFMIS platform”.

The DG stated further that, “we have assembled a team of external and internal experts to help with the training on using the GIFMIS budget preparation module. The will bring their wealth of experience on Public Finance Management, Budgeting, GIFMIS and Technology to bear on this programme”.

He reaffirmed the commitment of the Federal government in ensuring that January to December financial year as prescribed in the Nigerian constitution is restored. “To achieve this, we must be able to submit the 2018 Executive Budget Proposal to the National Assembly by the first week of October in order to ensure its passage no later than December 2017” Akabueze concluded.