Innovictor
New Member
About three weeks ago, I started a thread about how Nigerian banks are revising their credit policies in view of the bleak economic outlook of the country in 2015. In that piece, I talked about how Deposit Money Banks are reducing their credit facilities to companies by as much as 50% and I talked about the companies that are most at risk.
One week later, I started another thread on the tough economic challenges that awaits the next president as soon as the elections are over. I talked about the danger of running the budget at a deficit and I proffered some solutions that could make the government of the day popular. The major solutions that I proffered included reducing the salaries of political office holders, reducing bureaucracy in government and promoting transparency and accountability in government business.
Based on my observations as extrapolated in the two posts mentioned above, the people who are most at the risk of losing their jobs are those that work in companies that are dependent on government patronage such as construction, travel agencies, airlines and procurement & supply agencies. In addition, civil servants in heavily bureaucratic ministries are also at risk of seeing job axing or pay cuts.
Thankfully, if you work in any of the aforementioned industries, you need not worry because your job is safe as the government has done the "unexpected". In a bid to avoid running the 2015 budget at a deficit, the Federal Government has slashed capital expenditures in the 2015 budget spending by more than 50%, the Vanguard reports.
The amount now allocated to capital expenditure in the 2015 budget spending now stands at N387 billion or 8.9% of a total spending of N4.357 trillion. The slashing of the 2015 capital expenditure effectively puts this year's CapEx at almost a third of 2014's CapEx, which was 23.7% of the projected government spending last year.
It might interest you to know that capital expenditure often represents the amount earmarked for infrastructure development projects such as making, upgrading and maintenance of roads, ports, hospitals and schools among others. Hence, one would naturally expect the government to leave CapEx intact while looking for other avenues to cut costs.
However, the Director General, Budget Office, Bright Okogwu has defended the proposed slashing of CapEx by saying that it would be easier to reduce infrastructure projects than to reduce the expensive cost of maintaining bureaucracy in practically all the government ministries and parastatals. According to him, "you cannot reduce staff numbers overnight."
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