On Tuesday, the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs rejected the allocation of just N286 million to support Nigeria’s 109 overseas missions and condemned the Federal Government’s envelope budgeting method for its Ministries, Departments, and Agencies as being insufficient.
Based on a requirements analysis of the missions, the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested a budget of almost N1.5 trillion, according to documents provided to the Committee, which was chaired by Representative Busayo Oluwole Oke.
During Tuesday’s interactive session with the Ministry and the Federation’s Budget Office during the 2025 Budget defense, Committee Chairman Rep. Oke stated, “I have not seen anywhere in our laws where envelope budgeting is mentioned.” He also described the budget as being too small for missions that were meant to represent the nation’s image.
We are concerned that the submission you made to Mr. President was not grounded on a needs assessment and violates the law,” he continued.
During his presentation, Tanimu Yakubu, the Director General of the Budget Office, clarified that the 2025 budget boosted the budgetary allotment for the missions by 25 percent. Additionally, he asked the National Assembly to approve the tax reform bills in order to increase the country’s revenue.
Until the nation improved its financial output, Yakubu suggested reducing the number of foreign missions. “Until we can increase our revenue, why don’t we think about drastically cutting back on our overseas missions?” he said.
“There are 109 diplomatic missions overseas, which include 76 embassies, 22 high commissions, and 11 consulates,” he said. As you correctly said, the issue is as pervasive as the current state of affairs in Nigeria.When Nigeria’s debt service took nearly all of its earnings three years ago, the situation was undoubtedly worse. However, we began to notice progress under this government when debt service was lowered from as high as 100 percent to 55 percent in the first year through debt financial engineering.
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They will tell you that they began to feel some alleviation last year if you speak with our missions overseas. We have yet to reach that point. Beginning with the abolition of the PMS and other product subsidies and the deregulation of the foreign currency rate, the new administration has enacted bold reforms.
We anticipate that these two models will save roughly N11 trillion. Although the primary beneficiaries, particularly the state governments, collected the savings and remained silent, the savings began to appear in October of last year. But as far as we know, they stole a lot more than they had in a number of years.
“The National Assembly tax measures that you are considering have been brought before us, and we anticipate that you will make improvements to them so that we can increase our revenue collection.
As an extremely ambitious goal for oil production, Mr. President has gone out of his way to insist on 2.12 million barrels per day. He has realized that in order to meet these demands, we must look for income. The budget for this year is therefore ambitious. This year, it’s nearly N50 trillion, compared to roughly N36 trillion last year.
Whether we refer to it as envelope budgeting or something else, we must keep managing scarcity, he stated.
