The National Co-ordinator of Independent Shareholders Association (ISAN), Dr Anthony Omojola, has expressed doubts about the workability of the nation’s 2021 budget, saying that it was over-bloated and unnecessary.
According to him why would a sensible government make an over-bloated N13trillion budget that requires it to borrow over 40% of the total in order to be able to fund it.
He said it was desperate search for funds to fund the over-bloated and ill -conceived budget that has turned the government into a law breaker via its Finance Bill 2020 which allowed it to hijack private investments like the unclaimed dividends in contravention of the constitution which stipulates that no rule should be made to forcibly take-over private investment.
As Omojola maintained, given the Covid-19 impacts on the economy what the government could have done was to develop an effective budget that could enable the economy, hinting that the idea by Debt Management Office (DMO) to use sovereign guarantees to build infrastructures contained in the budget could be the way to go.
He stated that he is disappointed that the federal and the state government are not doing enough in the area of employment, saying that government is normally the highest employers of labour .According to him we are yet to hear the right news concerning the Empower mass employment initiative and the 774 Local council employees targeted by the federal government.
In his view, its via such mass employment initiatives that the country can survive the coronavirus economy in which we live, saying that in a situation where unemployment is soaring is not good for the economy.
He blamed government officials and politicians for the above situation, stressing that it was their failure to ensure that the contracts they signed with Chinese contractures were done with Nigerian labourers in mind the situation would have been better-instead of allowing the Chinese to come in with their own labourers against the interest of Nigerians.
As he argued it might be true that Covid-19 has benefited some sectors of the economy, but that the truth is that it’s the well educate experts that are benefited while the deep labourers are out of jobs and cant work remotely like the specially educated who are computer savvy.
