The Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing has proposed N441.559 billion in the 2019 budget with N408bn earmarked for capital projects.
The N8.826 trillion budget proposal document prepared by the Ministry of Budget and National Planning shows that the federal government will spend N3.435trn on Personnel, another N3.359trn on overhead amounting to a total recurrent expenditure of N6.794trn. However, only N2.031trn has been earmarked for capital expenditure in 2019.
For the tripartite ministry under Mr Babatunde Fashola, N33.530bn is for recurrent while N408bn is for capital expenditure. Among its agencies, Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) has the highest vote of N39bn, followed by N17bn for Rural Electrification Agency (REA) and N13bn for the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN). The ministry itself has N346.166bn vote to which N335.885bn is for capital projects.
Topping the key power projects is the spending on the ongoing construction of 700MW Zungeru hydropower in Niger state. About N4.3bn will be spent on relocation of affected persons, security, monitoring and evaluation for the project while N1.280bn will be for consultancy services.
The ministry which allocates N13bn to TCN will be spending another N5.181bn as counterpart financing for the over $1bn loans being processed to expanding transmission infrastructure.
Although government is procuring N72bn equipment for the Distribution Expansion programme for the Distribution Companies (DisCos) in 2018, the new 2019 proposal shows it will inject N1bn for this same cause.
The ministry pegged N348m for consultancy services for the valuation and compensation of people affected at the 3050 Mambilla hydropower construction site. It has arranged a N529m counterpart funding for the project which is yet to take off as fresh legal crisis is said to threaten it unless President Muhammadu Buhari intervenes.
It will spend N532m on Yola DisCo, a privatised firm but handed back to government since 2015.
Government also budgeted N400m for the ongoing 215 megawatts (MW) Kaduna power plant. The minister this month said the project was at over 80 per cent completion level.
The ministry will be spending a whopping N245m to monitor and evaluate ‘power sector performance nationwide’; it will then spend another huge N116m to buy the monitoring vehicles, the proposal showed.
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