The National Assembly has been requested by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), an anti-graft agency, to raise its budgetary allocation for 2024 from N43 billion to N76 billion.

 

This was included in the budget summary that the Chairman of the Commission, Ola Olukoyede, gave on Tuesday, December 5, to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Crimes.

 

The FG’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.

But, the EFCC proposed N76.5 billion with a capital component of N25 billion, overhead pegged at N14.5 billion and personnel cost at N37 billion.

Breaking down the costs, the commission proposed N2.6 billion for the procurement of vehicles in 2024 and another N1.7 billion for international travels.

Going forward, 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.

It also slashed the proposal for foreign trips to N563.2 million from the N1.7 billion proposed by the EFCC.

Justifying the need for the lawmakers to increase the EFCC budget, Olukoyede said;

“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,” he said

 

“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 added.

Mr Olukoyede said the commission is proposing N25 billion as capital cost because the N1.241 billion proposed by the budget office “will not do anything” for the agency.