2018 Budget: N/Assembly Threatens To Give NIMASA Zero Allocations

Members of the House Committee on Maritime Safety, Education and Administration yesterday threatened to give the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) zero allocation in the 2018 budget for spending below 10 percent of its capital budget in 2017.
The Chairman of the Committee, Mohammed Umar Bago, and his members were on an oversight function to the agency yesterday.

The Chairman, after carefully listening to a presentation on the agency 2017 budget performance, said that the house cannot continue to appropriate money to agencies who will not spend it.
Bago who also disclosed that the National Assembly had resolved to allocate in the 2018 budget the same amount spent on capital project in 2017 to any agency that refused to spend its budget on capital project.

He said: “This is a direct threat to NIMASA. We are going to give them zero allocation in the 2018 budget for failing to spend above ten percent of their budget on capital project in 2017. You are meant to spend funds allocated to you.”
In the budget presentation, government approved the sum of N169.1 billion as the agency’s total budget for 2017.

The Agency said that it appropriated the sum of N14.6 billion on capital projects, out of which it spent about N5.5billion on the same project, an amount which the parliamentarians said was not good enough.