Tope Fasua, Special Adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Economic Affairs, has explained the misconception surrounding how the federal government allocates funds to the Ministry of Defence and how much goes into the maintenance of the presidential air fleet, news.ng reports.
Fasua, who appeared on Channels Television’s programme Morning Brief on Wednesday, said that there is more attention on the maintenance of the presidential air fleet than on the Ministry of Defence.
According to the economic adviser, the misconception could be traced to a lack of clarity between recurrent and capital expenditures.
He noted that expenses such as aircraft maintenance, payment of salaries for crew members, and logistics are on a routine basis.
Regarding capital expenditure, Fasua explained that the release of funds undergoes laid-down procedures.
He said, “The spending on presidential air fleet is a recurrent spending, whereas the, you mentioned that Nigeria Army couldn’t buy equipment, so more than 7% was, no more than 7% was spent. Now, the thing with the equipment, the capital equipment for the army that you mentioned, is a capital spending, and in the year 2024, in the year 2025, it was 2024 capital that was spent.
“You can’t fail to service an aircraft. You can’t fail to pay the pilots and the crew their money to run their operations. That is recurrent.
“Of course, everybody agrees that recurrent is easier to disburse than capital. Capital has to go through a process. And nobody has said that the defence sector has not been funded.”
When asked about the humongous amount budgeted for defence and why, in the end, only a fraction of the figure is released,
He responded, saying, “Now, remember I said that because there was a transition in May 29, 2023, there was an overlap to ensure that the Buhari budget ran before the punitive budget began to kick in, and that has created this overlap, even though it took Buhari government five years to be able to get into that budget cycle.”
According to him, this cycle of Ministries, Departments, or Agencies (MDAs) not receiving their allocated budgetary figures has been recurring in successive administrations.
He maintained that despite the challenges faced, the administration is making progress in the disbursement of funds.
“Even in Jonathan era, with Minister Okonjo-Iweala, who is a very, very astute person, they couldn’t get that done. So now we know that we would, but however, beyond the aesthetics and the elegance of having a January to December budget, what’s more important is that whatever is spent actually is accounted for, number one, and secondly, that it actually gets and trickles down to the people, and matters to the people. So, the same thing happened for the health sector,” he noted.
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