Feasting on pork barrels

Many Nigerians were up in arms last week at the discovery that Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Abdulmumin Jibrin sneaked N4 billion worth of projects for his Bebeji/Kiru Federal Constituency into the 2016 Federal budget. This, when a key Executive project such as the Lagos-Calabar rail line was missing from the budget and another […]

Many Nigerians were up in arms last week at the discovery that Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Abdulmumin Jibrin sneaked N4 billion worth of projects for his Bebeji/Kiru Federal Constituency into the 2016 Federal budget. This, when a key Executive project such as the Lagos-Calabar rail line was missing from the budget and another key project, Idu-Kaduna rail line, had eight billion naira slashed from its allocation. Media reports said many MPs rose at a closed-door session and demanded Jibrin’s resignation, until Speaker Yakubu Dogara rescued him.
I wish I was inside the House chamber during the executive session to hear the reasons advanced by those members who wanted Jibrin to resign. Where were all of them when the Appropriations Committees of both House and Senate approved the budget details containing the borehole, water and sanitation projects that Jibrin allegedly smuggled into the bill? I thought the entire bill was separately passed by the two chambers of the National Assembly. Either the two chambers passed the budget bill without seeing the details, or else each member was provided with the details but no one noticed the concentration of projects at Bebeji/Kiru. Either way they have forfeited their right to talk now.
Newspaper editors rushed to the aid of these wailing wailers by supplying the supposedly pejorative term ‘pork barrel’ to describe what Abdulmumin Jibrin did. Well, what he did has been a common practice in the US Congress for two hundred years. I thought Nigerians justify every practice once it can be shown that it is done in the US. Copying the American example is particularly reasonable in this case since the presidential system of government was borrowed hook, line, sinker, pork and barrel from the Yanks.
Sneaking pork barrel items into bills is a specialty of US Senators and Congressmen, especially the senior ones who get to become principal officers, committee and sub-committee chairmen. The seniority system typical of the US Congress has not yet taken root in our National Assembly, where new members jostle with older ones for chairmanship of ‘juicy’ committees. Maybe that is because the turnover rate in our Assembly is too high. Since 2003 an average 80 percent of senators and Representatives are thrown out during each election cycle, which makes it difficult to impose a seniority system.
Yet there are serious advantages to the system because senior legislators who get to become committee chairmen, especially key ones such as the Appropriations Committee, can add pork barrel projects for their constituencies into the budget and in fact into non-budget bills as well. The US Federal budget for 2010 was estimated to contain 9,000 pork barrel projects worth $16.5 billion. A Congressman who is powerful enough can add a pork barrel project into a bill that has nothing to do with appropriation. The best place to do this is in a president’s favourite bill which he is eager to sign. If he does not like the attached pork barrel items, the president’s only option is to veto the entire bill. President Barak Obama’s key economic stimulus bill of 2009 returned with pork barrel items worth $7.7 billion, and he signed it.
This practice became such a problem that in the 1980s, the conservative columnist George Will proposed a constitutional amendment to provide for “the item veto,” under which the president can veto an item in a bill, not the entire bill. By getting so many items into the budget for Bebeji/Kiru, Jibrin seeks to become our equivalent of former US Congressman Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago. That powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee was credited with securing pork barrel projects worth billions of dollars for Chicago including money for bridges, parks, shoreline and stadiums. Smuggling pork barrel items into bills is made possible in the US because every single item in a bill is law and must be implemented. Here, the budget is traditionally seen as a mere proposal and the Executive picks and chooses what it wants to implement.
In the past week, Executive Branch officials showed outrage that Jibrin and his colleagues inserted many projects into the budget while a key Executive project, the Lagos-Calabar rail line, was left out of it. I think it is clear by now that it was the Executive Branch’s sloppiness that left this rail project out of the budget document submitted by the president. Minister of Transport Rotimi Amaechi tried to smuggle it back in through the Senate’s Land Transport Committee, instead of asking the president to write a letter to the National Assembly and ask for its inclusion. 
Some people are now arguing that the Assembly has no right to include in the budget projects that were not recommended by the Executive Branch. One gets the impression that such commentators want the Assembly to merely rubber stamp the Executive’s budget. If that was what the Constitution wanted, it should have said so. Otherwise, the budget bill must be treated like any other bill, subject to changes and additions.
At least one writer said that it is only the president who knows what is good for the country and only projects conceived by him should be in the federal budget. There are several problems with this assertion. For one, it is not even clear which of the items included in the budget document that Buhari sent to the National Assembly last December were his. This is because he sensationally said in Riyadh that civil servants padded the budget. Most of the padded items are still there, so how can anyone hold the document to be sacrosanct? Yet, the tone of the Federal Executive Council meeting held a day after the president received budget details suggested that ministers were looking to nix items added by the Assembly. The looks on the faces of President Buhari, Vice President Osinbajo and National Planning and Budget Minister Udoma Udo Udoma in a photo I saw in the newspapers in which they were scrutinising the budget details conveyed the same impression. Our proposals or nothing, they seemed to be saying. I do not know the moral underpinnings of this posture since, like the president, the National Assembly is also elected.
In any case, some items in the Executive Branch’s budget such as the N500 billion welfare projects are but well dressed pork barrels. Giving money to a market woman to boost her stall or hiring a young graduate who is not a trained teacher to teach is not more justifiable than building a borehole in Bebeji. From the day in 1985 that Nigeria abandoned national development planning, all government projects have a political content and cannot be justified with reference to a well thought out national development plan. I am thinking of the Lagos-Calabar coastal rail project, for instance. I haven’t seen the route that this rail line will follow; I hope it will pass through Onitsha. Otherwise, if it will closely hug the coastline and go through Otuoke, I doubt if it will be of much benefit to goods haulage in the country.
So please, let us not waste more time and energy lampooning pork barrels while the federal budget lies around unsigned. Other members should learn from Jibrin and insert pork barrel items during the next budget cycle, over and above the institutionalised pork barrel called constituency projects. If they are lucky, the president will implement them. For now, the important thing is for the president to sign the budget immediately so that implementation can begin and we can all feast on pork barrels, for a change.