Very shockingly, “the Change” government led by President Muhammadu Buhari is regressing slowly to the lethargy of its predecessors as far as managing the economy is concerned.
The increasingly bad signal was accentuated last week by the cancellation indefinitely of the schedule for Budget 2016 approval process. National Assembly (NASS) had planned to finish work on the Appropriation Bill on February 28, 2016 ready for presidential assent into law – or veto. Now, it has been postponed indefinitely.
As it is widely known, the paddings in the bill presented to the lawmakers with much fanfare can hardly stand up to legislative scrutiny.
Complaints of doctored figures, substitution of inflated sums and secret slashing of other estimates have made an embarrassing muddle of what used to be smooth adjustments of figures to reflect the current needs of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) throughout the budget year.
We are yet to know whether the mythical “fifth columnists” in government hacked the computers of ministries of Finance and of National Planning and Budget to add the viruses which corrupted the relevant documents.
On the contrary, it beats our imagination hollow that competent hands appointed as ministers and top executives of government parastatals at Budget Office and elsewhere would suddenly turn totally incompetent in such embarrassing way the budget documents turned out to be.
The complaints so far revolve around sums never requested for and therefore padded on at Ministry of Education, ballooned figures of two key agencies of Ministry of Information and Culture – News Agency of Nigeria and National Films and Video Censorship Board – as well as significant requests inappropriately slashed such as overhead expenditures for Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) whose overhead of N2.999 billion was slashed to N1.389 billion or 116 per cent? Or a total mess up with substituted estimates at Ministry of Health.
The cause of this national embarrassment is unknown. But the Appropriation Bill points the way for all citizens, especially the private business class who take a cue from the budget to plan their corporate projections for the year.
Needless to say, the consequences are enormous for the failed appropriation process: The worst of all is, the annual budget which should be implemented for one full year gets the time slashed to anything up to eight months or less.
In its aftermath in the MDAs, the usual Unspent Funds at the end of the year disappear into corrupt pockets unless the executive specifically orders their return to the Treasury.
More important, we are concerned that the government elected with high expectations of doing things differently, and better, is also regressing atavistically to the lethargy of its clay-footed predecessors. Business-as-usual it is called.
Beyond the timing, the government needs no reminder about the demand for accelerated job creation to absorb the millions of unemployed youth dabbling into crimes of necessity. Absorbing them into gainful productive work would minimize their propensity to crime. As such, we expect for example, the three-in-one super-ministry of Works, Power and Housing to lay its funding priority on Works because of its high job-creation capacity and virtually instant commencement of projects implementation. But the ministry allocated the bulk of its fund to Power which has only one government agency, TCN, under its wings to fund in whole. Works rather got N99bn and N66bn for the Housing department of the ministry.
Capital equipment for power industries are not sold off-shelf. Allocated N268bn billion, it would lie fallow till the capital equipment are manufactured abroad and shipped to Nigeria perhaps after six months, for example. Meantime, the N99 billion left for 31 Works projects covering 2,999.6km obviously reflects a serious lack of sense of urgency about putting the able-bodied idle youth into gainful employment. For, the pervasive poverty-induced crimes make them gravitate into serious crimes such as kidnapping, armed robbery, etc which stalk or ravage parts of the society.
Very reluctantly, we now have a good reason to question the competence of the collective national governance leadership especially in the Executive and legislature. Year-in, year-out, the preparation, scrutiny, rejection or approval of the national budget has become too onerous a task for them to carry out. The recrudescence of delays, padding, slashing etc since Olusegun Obasanjo regime, should have ended with Goodluck Jonathan’s government for a change. But they are again with us. Yes, no demands by legislators for bribe-for-budget-approval. At least not in the open. Which lends credibility to EFCC’s toils that honesty and integrity are returning to public office under the anti-corruption war.
It is high time the national leaders got their acts together. The budget is so significant because government is the biggest spender in the economy. The economy virtually shuts down with private sector tied-to-the apron strings of government coming to a near-halt once the budget passage delays.
We have heard enough excuses. We need urgent collaboration between the Executive and Legislature to get this law passed. Going forward, joint NASS committees with the National Planning Ministry should be constituted for monthly meetings with the sector ministries to work together on the budget during its preparatory phase. So that when the document is ready, there would be nothing new about it except formally lay it before NASS plenary.
But above all, once Budget 2016 finally gets through, the executive-legislature joint committees must get to work immediately on Budget 2017. That way, the budget would get to NASS by September or October for lawmakers to pass it before their Xmas recess.