The Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (OAGF) released the sum of N743.7 billion in capital funds to Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) between March and August.

The Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF), Mrs Oluwatoyin Madein, disclosed this at a one-day workshop on the federal government Cash Plan policy implementation,  in Abuja,  this afternoon.

According to her, the policy has given a boost to timely releases of funds for the implementation of the capital budget of the federal government.

The capacity building workshop had the  theme,  “Implementation of Cash Plan Policy in Nigeria: prospects and challenges.”

Addressing the participants,  the AGF, said, “Drawing from the theme of this workshop, it is obvious that the participants stand a chance of getting better insight on the recent deployment of an IT solution (GIFMIS cash planning module) to the cash management practices of the FGN.

“In an attempt to end the continuous extension of the budget circle, the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation came up with the Bottom-up Cash Management and drafted an implementation guideline in June, 2020 alongside a Treasury circular issued on 29th May, 2020.

“To boost the implementation of the policy, the then Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning sought and got a presidential approval on the 24th of August, 2022.

“This was followed immediately with a review of the Cash Management Guideline and the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) in January, 2023 by the OAGF Cash Management Team and the GIFMIS Team in collaboration with the World Bank Experts engaged by the OAGF.

“May I inform participants that prior to the implementation of this policy, the Capital Development Fund was committed to the tune of over N1.5tn and these commitments remained so for months indicating that the actual cash needs of MDAs were ignored in the releases of funds to the MDAs thereby slowing down the utilization of already allocated funds while government continuously pay interest on borrowed funds already committed.

“As at today, through the policy, the Treasury has successfully processed and released a total sum of N743.737bn from March to August 2023 while a total sum of N487.421bn is currently being processed for September and October, 2023.”