Seemingly oblivious to the worldwide decline in the price of crude oil, the Federal Government of Nigeria in its proposed 2015 budget submitted to the National Assembly, has pegged the Oil benchmark price at $78 per barrel as well as pegging the exchange rate at N165 to the dollar.
It is instructive to note that the initial draft of the 2014 budget proposed a benchmark price of $74 per barrel but the National Assembly changed it to $77 after weeks of negotiations.
The estimated projection of crude oil production stands at a little over 2.2 million barrels per day.
There are many voices already raising concern over the proposed budget seeing oil is doing very poorly in the international market and OPEC has remained adamant in its decision not to cut oil production quotas.
The Nigerian Naira is currently on what seems to be an unarrestable free fall even as it has further plunged on the parallel market to N185 to the dollar. It is a worrisome situation which has people wondering how pragmatic the proposed 2015 budget is.
It is doubly worrying particularly considering the fact that it is assumed that the bulk of the budget would be focused on recurrent expenditure; further hampering the possibility of the government embarking on real infrastructural projects.