New Telegraph

Budget 2022: FG mulls technology to monitor projects above N150m

The Federal Government is set to deploy technology to monitor projects valued above N150 million, New Telegraph has learnt. The monitoring, it was gathered, would involve geotagging of the projects, using the Global Positioning System (GPS). GPS is a navigation system using satellites, a receiver and algorithms to synchronise location, velocity and time data. According to the 2022 budget circular issued by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, all ministry departments and agencies of government must submit the GPS coordinates of their projects along with their budget.

“Please note that it is now a requirement to provide the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of the location of all projects above N150 million in value to be included in the budget. “This will aid geotagging of the projects and facilitate deployment of technology in monitoring & evaluation,” the ministry stated in the circular. In the circular, government is proposing to spend a total of N1.8 trillion on capital projects across sectors of the economy in 2022.

This, the ministry said, reflected the effective implementation of the Medium-Term National Development Plan (MTNDP) 2021–2025), adding that the MDAs are required to keep their projects within their respective ministerial mandates as approved by the president.

While noting that implementation of the 2021 capital expenditure budget is expected to close by December 31, 2021, in view of FGN’s commitment to maintaining a predictable January – December fiscal period, the ministry warned the MDAs not to roll over 2021 capital project provisions, as it is expected that MDAs’ capital budget for 2021 will be fully funded. “The thrust of the FGN’s capi-tal expenditure programme in 2022 will be the completion of as many ongoing projects as possible, rather than starting new projects.

“Thus, MDAs are, hereby, advised that new projects will not be admitted into the capital budget for 2022 unless adequate provision has been made for the completion/work programme of all ongoing projects. “Capital projects are to be prioritised based on their contribution to sectoral/ministerial mandates – the 9 priority areas, as well as the attainment of the strategic objectives of the Medium Term National Development Plan (MTNDP 2021–2025). MDAs are expected to rank capital projects by priority within their allotted ceilings,” the ministry stated. In allocating capital budget resources, the MDAs were also advised to accord priority to ongoing projects, especially those nearing completion that fit into the government’s current priorities.

“As a general rule, MDAs may not be allowed to initiate new projects/programmes unless they can demonstrate that adequate provisions have been made for ongoing projects. In addition to alignment with the objectives of the MTNDP, the likelihood of completion within the medium-term, i.e., not later than 2024, should be considered in prioritising capital projects,” government said. Meanwhile, A Nigerian civictechnology company, BudgIT, has launched an online platform that would enable Nigerians to monitor the Federal Government’s treasury and see how the government is spending its money in real-time. According to BudgIT, the platform called govspend.ng is a comprehensive portal that would grant access to visualised and simplified data from government’s open treasury portal.

It is targeted at citizens as well as civil society organisations and members of the media. The platform draws from Federal Government’s Open Treasury Portal (OTP) launched in 2019 by the Buhari administration to increase transparency and accountability in government spending. The OTP collates spending data from ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs). While the OTP gives the public access to these data on government spending, govspend.ng simplifies and presents these treasury reports in visualised formats. This, the organisation hopes, will help citizens to easily access, monitor, and understand Federal Government’s real-time expenditure. The online platform would also point out anomalies in these spendings as discovered by the BudgIt team. These anomalies include payments made to multiple beneficiaries, payments without descriptions, payments made to personal accounts, etc. Speaking about the launch, CEO of BudgIT, Gabriel Okeowo, while noting that FG had done a great job in ensuring that the government’s daily spendings are in the public domain, data on the portal are mostly in non-machine readable formats. They are also not downloadable. “We devel-

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