(Ecofin Agency) - President Muhammadu Buhari’s has been put under a lot of pressure to cut expenditures in the face of falling oil prices.

The amount of persistent expenditures is “a huge worry for a developing country like Nigeria,” Stanley Achonu, the head of operations at BudgIT, an organization that works to bring transparency to public spending, told Sweet crude in an interview. While the country can make some savings in the budget, “we can’t halve it,” he said.

The Nigerian government makes about two-thirds of its revenue from the export of oil, the price of which has plunged by more than half in the past year to below $50/ barrel. The last budget passed by the former president, Goodluck Jonathan, was based on an oil price of $53/barrel.

According to spokesman Femi Adesina, Buhari “expects a budget where recurrent spending is going to be lower than it currently is, and where there will be more for capital expenditure”. He added that savings will come through cutting waste, rather than firing workers or reducing pay-checks.

Dropping oil revenue limited economic growth to 2.4 %in Q2 from 4 % in the previous three months, and impelled the central bank to impose foreign-exchange restrictions to shore up the currency as reserves dwindled.

 “The budget is something Buhari has to get right, and he has to move swiftly on, but as there are still no ministers, it’s going to be difficult,” Laura Barber, an intelligence analyst at AKE Group, commented. “Beyond security and his anti-corruption campaign, his policy statements are very vague, which causes concern.”

“The finance minister must be a strong candidate, who “can say: I will cut the recurrent spending because there are poor people in this country,” Ben Murray-Bruce, a senator from the oil-producing Bayelsa state, said. “The money saved can go on education, on the power sector, on the infrastructure deficit.”