The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has appealed to the National Assembly to increase its 2024 budgetary allocation from N43 billion to N76 billion.
The Anti-graft agency revealed this in the budget synopsis presented by the Commission’s Chairman, Ola Olukoyede, to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Crimes on Tuesday, December 5th 2023.
Recall that the Federal Government’s Budget Office proposed N43.1 billion for the commission with a breakdown of N37 billion as personnel cost, N4.7 as overhead and N1.2 billion for capital projects.
However the Commission proposed the sum of N76.5 billion with a capital component of N25 billion, overhead pegged at N14.5 billion and personnel cost at N37 billion.
The EFCC boss said that the commission proposed N2.6 billion for the procurement of vehicles in 2024 and another N1.7 billion for international travels.
He said, the budget office, in its final approval, removed the N2.6 billion for vehicles, N11 billion proposed for the construction of offices and N2.6 billion for security equipment. Olukoyede stated that the EFCC slashed the proposal for foreign trips to N563.2 million from the N1.7 billion earlier proposed, justifying the need for the lawmakers to increase the EFCC budget.
He added that commission is proposing N25 billion as capital cost because the N1.241 billion proposed by the budget office “will not do anything”.
“From the realistic point of view, what we think is, it will be good for us to work…because if we ‘manage’ to investigate and prosecute crime, you (lawmakers) will also ‘manage’ to abuse us that we are not working”.
“So, we don’t want to receive such an attack (criticisms) from you and we don’t want to ‘manage’. That is why we increased it (capital expenditure) to N25 billion which we think will suffice for us to operate in the year 2024”. He stressed.
