As the demons in Budget 2016 manifest

Expectations that the wasteful tradition of late passage and implementation of the national budget were raised when the National Assembly announced that the 2016 budget will be passed on February 25th this year. To lend weight to its resolve for facilitating an early passage for the budget the federal legislature suspended plenary session for two […]

Expectations that the wasteful tradition of late passage and implementation of the national budget were raised when the National Assembly announced that the 2016 budget will be passed on February 25th this year. To lend weight to its resolve for facilitating an early passage for the budget the federal legislature suspended plenary session for two weeks during which period Senators and Members of the House of Representatives would be free to attend to only the pressing issues relating to passing the budget.
That gesture from the National Assembly was to ensure a clear departure from tradition whereby the budget process would often linger deep into the second quarter – April and May; leading to avoidable distortions in economic and business plans by both government agencies and private citizens. It is believed that the late passage of the budget is a principal culprit in the ruinous tradition of poor implementation of the budget, at least since return of democratic governance in 1999.
But all of such rosy expectations of an earlier passage of the budget seem to have been blown into smithereens while all talks about a new date are now blowing in the wind. And this is official at least with the pronouncement by the National Assembly. Just last week, the Appropriation Committees of both chambers of the National Assembly, through their Chairmen namely Senator Danjuma Goje of the Senate and Honourable Abdulmumin Jibril of the House of Representatives, declared same to Nigerians at a press conference, and cited the deluge of errors in the N6.8 trillion budget presented by President Muhamadu Buhari as the reason.
For instance even as Nigerians are yet to recover from the shock associated with the shameful January drama of the missing/substitution of the original budget document presented by President Muhamadu Buhari, there is the issue of the Minister of Health Professor Isaac Adewole rejecting the very budget of his ministry, claiming that it was a counterfeit of what he approved and expected to defend at the National Assembly. This is just as there is an avalanche of other instances of less than credible entries in the budget.
According to Abdulmumin Jibril there is evidence of over-bloated personnel costs as well as mismatch between capital and recurrent expenditures. This development points to the perpetuation in the bureaucracy that will work with the new administration, of the ghost worker syndrome and creation of loopholes for stealing public funds.
So grievous and pervasive have the errors become that there are stringent calls for the president to withdraw the entire budget document and re-present it when duly amended. Patriotic as such a call may be, withdrawing the budget may prove counter-productive, as such the dividends of the action may not be justified. In the first place, presenting another edition of the budget just because of the errors in the document may not change much as the National Assembly will still exercise its exclusive powers to re-fashion whatever the executive presents to it, in line with its perspective of national interest. Besides, a recall of the budget may even reverse the country’s new found trajectory towards a relatively early passage of the 2016 budget.
A moot assuring point in this respect is the process whereby the very bureaucrats who framed the budget in the respective ministries, departments and agencies of government, are routinely invited along with their chief executives, by the relevant committees of the National Assembly to defend budget submissions credited to their establishments. The opportunity therefore exists for the National Assembly to do the needful as the case may be.
However, while it may be asking for too much for the budget framers in the executive arm of government to offer a perfect document, the complement of errors that featured in the 2016 budget and in respect of which the NASS is postponing the passage date, remain a matter over which questions need to be raised. Seen in proper context, a most vexatious aspect is the practice whereby the financial values attached to budget items are inflated several times over, in a syndrome that has been rechristened as ‘budget padding’.
It would seem that while the National Assembly was intent on delivering a good job with the 2016 budget, certain factors whose operational characteristics tend towards the demonic, have contrived to deny the country the dividends of such enterprise. Yet the main concern is not that the errors and their patron demons are manifesting at this time, but that they are predictable and needed to be anticipated. Given the prevailing circumstances associated with the nation’s budget process at all the tiers of governance, hardly can an outcome that is different from what is recorded with the 2016 budget come to be.  In the same vein if the necessary remedial steps are not taken now, the situation may return in subsequent years in yet to be identified formats.
This much was envisaged in the Legislative Agenda adopted by each of the two chambers of the present Eighth National Assembly. The revelation of anomalies and incongruities associated with the 2016 budget are therefore the eventual tell-tale play out of incidences whereby the legislature caught the demons in the executive arm, red handed in the celebration of sleaze.
Nevertheless, beyond the din and theatrics associated with the budget padding shenanigans, lie a complement of valid lessons for the stake holders in the nation’s budget exercise, not only at the federal tier of governance, but even at the other tiers of states and local governments. For the National Assembly the experience has reinforced the imperative of renewed vigilance in its gate keeping functions with respect to ensuring the promotion of national interest.
With respect to the 2016 budget, it should press on with the full exercise of its constitutional powers and the provisions of the Legislative Agenda, with particular emphasis on not only delineating ceilings on funding requirements, but also setting execution time limits on projects in the budget. This provision of the Agenda, requires government establishments that face unavoidable delays and cost overruns in executing any budgeted project, to seek specific approval of the National Assembly before amending the operational aspects of the designated project. If implemented this provision offers the prospect of taming the out-of-control crisis of abandoned projects that litter the length and breadth of the country.
For the Buhari administration which is coming on stream with a change mind-set, the development qualifies as a welcome eye opening dispensation, especially given that it is the administration’s first ever budget exercise. Given its commitment to fighting corruption, the grand scale kleptomaniacal spectacle of budget padding, as witnessed in the 2016 budget exercise, indicates how close the demon of corruption  lies to the innards of the administration.
For any administration, the budget is the central programme of activities with which it defines it programmes and directs activities accordingly. If such a facility therefore faces an integrity deficit, the implications for the administration are easily imagined.
That is why President Muhamadu Buhari needs to deploy whatever measure it will take to tackle the mess in the budget process by looking deeper into the executive bureaucracy, with a view to reinventing the establishment nationwide.  Nothing short of that will save the administration and the country from the factors that are bedeviling the nation’s public sector, and thereby threaten his tenure.
This article was originally published two weeks ago. Daminabo will be back next week with a new piece.