Breaking: Federal Government of Nigeria slashes 2020 budget

The Federal Government has sent a revised budget to the National Assembly, cutting down some costs in view of the coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria.

According to Punch Newspaper, a top source in the National Assembly shared a copy of the revised 2020 budget on Wednesday, noting that a meeting was ongoing between the leadership of the National Assembly and the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, and the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mele Kyari.

Part of the documents showed that there is a 20 per cent cut on capital projects across ministries, departments and agencies to the tune of N312,820,542,675.

Meanwhile; NewsWireNGR recalls that on Monday, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mele Kyari, had said the era of fuel subsidy is gone forever in Nigeria.

Speaking on an Africa Independent Television (AIT) programme on Monday, Mr Kyari said, “There is no fuel subsidy anymore in Nigeria. It is zero subsidy forever.”

Going forward, the oil chief said, “There would be no resort to either fuel subsidy or under-recovery of any nature. NNPC will play in the petroleum marketplace, just like another marketer in the space.”

“But we will be there for the country to sustain the security of supply at market price,” he said, indicating the government was not deregulating the petrol sub-sector, and would still fix prices.

Mr Kyari described the NNPC as a transparent organisation, saying the state oil firm was probably the “only company in the world that publishes its monthly financial and operations reports.”