Udoma: Rewane committee will look for additional revenue to pay minimum wage

Udoma Udo Udoma, minister for budget and national planning, says the technical committee led by Bismarck Rewane will identify ways of increasing revenue to pay the proposed minimum wage.

President Muhammadu Buhari had, on Wednesday, inaugurated a technical committee by the economic analyst on the implementation of a new minimum wage.

Speaking during the weekend at an interaction with media editors in Lagos, Udoma said the committee is expected to make suggestions as to how the government can still meet its expenditure on other services such as education, health, infrastructure and other important functions, after paying the increased salaries.

“The committee is expected to, amongst other things, look at how to get additional revenues so that as our wage bill goes up, we are able to increase our revenues to ensure that our spending on capital projects, our spending on basic infrastructure, our spending on health, our spending on education and others is not reduced,” he said.

“In short, the committee is to advise on ways to ensure that notwithstanding the increase in payroll costs, there continues to be adequate funding for other government activities. This is not just for the 2019 fiscal year, but going forward, thereafter.”

Speaking on the issue of debt service to revenue ratio, the minister said the ratio will reduce as the revenue situation improves.

“Nigeria does not have a debt problem, as such. Our debt is within prudent limits. However, we need to optimise our revenue generating potential. This will bring down our debt service to revenue ratio.

“Given the size of our economy we can, and should, be doing better, in revenue generation. This explains our focus as a Government on revenues and revenue generation.

“Some commentators have complained that the 2019 Budget Proposal is too small. They would like us to have a larger budget. All of us in Government would also like Nigeria to have a larger budget. Indeed as our revenues grow we will be able to expand our budget size. In truth, though we have increased our budget size significantly since we took over Government in 2015, our budget size is still far too small to meet all our needs.

“However, we are limited by the size of our revenues. Our current proposal for 2019 represents the maximum size that we believe we can prudently fund from our revenue and debt sources.

“There is no point announcing a large budget that you cannot fund. As we are able to generate more revenues in future we will be able to continue to increase the size of our budgets.”

Udoma explained that the government is working on improving the environment for economic expansion that will lead to the creation of additional jobs.