Rivers State’s zero-budget for 2014

For the purpose of refreshing the issue, the Rivers State 2014 budget was presented to the  Rivers State House of Assembly in the Government House, Port Harcourt on January 6, 2014, and was passed same day to be signed into law by the State Governor Rotimi  Amaechi, also same day. Ever since, the public domain […]

For the purpose of refreshing the issue, the Rivers State 2014 budget was presented to the  Rivers State House of Assembly in the Government House, Port Harcourt on January 6, 2014, and was passed same day to be signed into law by the State Governor Rotimi  Amaechi, also same day. Ever since, the public domain has been abuzz with sundry submissions either in support or condemnation of the development.  Public debate on the  matter, including Sagay’s distinguished intervention, had mostly highlighted  infractions bordering on the venue for the seating being the Government House Port Harcourt, and rather than the Chamber of the  Rivers State House of Assembly.
Professor Sagay’s intervention expectedly enriched the debate, but for a caveat. While he provided the Constitutional perspective for the venue of the seating to be proper, he was surprisingly silent on the express provision of the same Constitution on the timing of the exercise. For this instance, many avid readers of Sagay, including myself, will feel short-changed by him for some time.  
Specifically, it would have been interesting to relish how Sagay would have handled the extant provisions of the Constitution in Section 121, which states that “The Governor shall cause to be prepared and laid before the House of Assembly at any time before the commencement of each financial year estimates of the revenues and expenditure of the State for the next financial year. By that provision, it would mean that the budget presentation exercise of January 6, 2014, was actually not in respect of 2014 but for 2015!  That in the ploughman’s plain language would mean that the Rivers State Government does not have a valid budget for 2014. In fact it failed to prepare one as required by law.
It is not unexpected that this contention had agitated the minds of not a few observers, with arguments coming from all directions for and against it. However given that it constitutes an express provision of the Constitution it remains unwise to wish it away. The question then is should the Rivers State Government be allowed to escape with this breach scot free, and by implication bloat the already overflowing cornucopia of mindless outrages in governance? More poignant is the fact that this slap on the Constitution comprises the icing on a budget process, which by all indications was a patent charade, aimed at demonstrating a freedom of criminal impunity, by a political leadership whose moral compass has gone berserk.
For reasons of clarification a government’s budget is a legally binding plan of the revenues and expenditures for a designated year. Ordinarily the budget exercise should enable the legislature  to review the performance of the previous year’s, and based on its findings, pass the fresh one with or without amendments. In its passage through the legislative process, the budget bill is expected to go through the mandatory three readings, in the course of which the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), would make submissions in defence of their proposals. In the light of the foregoing, the budget document cannot be a matter of a few pages, even in its most conservative form.  
Therefore a situation where such a document went through first, second and third readings according to parliamentary procedures, was duly scrutinized and eventually passed by the Rivers State House of Assembly, all  in a matter of hours, remains one of two situations namely: a global wonder of superlative legislative enterprise, or a grand exercise in actionable political chicanery. Indeed the development, along with other equally reprehensible tendencies, has put the Nigerian Constitution to the test, spawning a clarion call for its redemption.
It is significant that in the course of public run of the debate, some observers had in misplaced sympathy for the Rivers State Government, argued that the state was at the time of the budget presentation, under a siege  hence the exercise was informed by the principle of the ‘doctrine of necessity’. In political circumstances, the doctrine of necessity is an adopted basis on which inevitable extra-legal measures, intended to restore order in a polity, are found to be constitutional. In its application it justifies a process whereby that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful.
Granted the wide ambit of breaches the doctrine may rationalise, applying it to the Rivers State scenario is at best  a dubious allusion to the situation in 2007, when with the medical incapacitation of late President Umaru Yar Adua, the National Assembly created the conducive environment for then Vice President Dr Goodluck Jonathan to act as President. At that time there was a constitutional lacunae on what the nation would do in the case of incapacitation of a sitting President. But in the case of Rivers State, there were no such lacunae. The state was not at war, and the only issue was a drama in which the governor had issues with a state’s commissioner of police that refused to play the former’s acolyte.  After all it was still under the so-called siege state of affairs that the House of Assembly opted to sit in the Government House. If the members could authenticate sitting outside the official chambers to pass a budget, what could have stopped them from doing same within the legally prescribed time frame?
 The Constitution is clear that for the budget of a particular year to be valid it must be presented in the preceding year. That is why it is also clear that what was passed is not implementable for 2014 but has to wait for 2015. In essence it mattered less that the Rivers State House of Assembly elected to turn itself into a rubber stamp parliament for massaging Amaechi’s ego than that the State Government shot itself in the foot by leading the state into zero budget for 2014. Sounds crazy?
It will therefore be interesting to see how the officials of the Rivers State government such as the Commissioner of Finance, Accountant General, Permanent Secretaries and all other accounting officers will disburse public funds ‘appropriated’ under this budget, in breach of extant laws, primary among which is the Constitution.