The Federal Executive Council (FEC) presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday, approved a draft 2021 Supplementary Budget of N770.60 billion for the acquisition of defense equipment.
Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, who disclosed this on Wednesday to journalists after the FEC virtual meeting also approved a supplementary budget for COVID-19 vaccine programme, covering 30 million vaccines from Johnson and Johnson and the logistics costs related to the deployment of the vaccines.
It also approved N40 billion provision to take care of the needs for allowances to the health, education sectors and other wage related issues. There is also N1.69 billion for the Nigeria Comprehensive AIDS Programme.
She further explained that government would draw from N39.58 billion to finance the supplementary budget just as it will withdraw N135 billion from special levy accounts for the same purpose.
“In line with this approval, we have also been given approval to draw down on some existing World Bank loans totaling about N39.58 billion as part of the financing source for this supplementary budget.
“We will be working with the World Bank to restructure some of the existing facilities to realise this N39.58 billion.
“We’ve also been given approval to withdraw N135 billion 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 722.53 billion 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,” she said.