President Muhammadu Buhari signed the 2018 Budget on 20 June 2018, exactly 224 days after the budget was presented to the National Assembly.
That it takes seven months to pass critical legislation that allocates public resources begs the question if Nigeria really is a serious country worth the now-less-used moniker “giant of Africa.” Both arms of government share any and all blame, as the National Assembly remarked that the heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) failed to appear for the budget hearings and it took a clear message from the President to compel them to undertake what should ordinarily be their professional and moral obligation.
The good news is, willy-nilly, we have the 2018 budget passed. The unfortunate reality is that this has come with certain scary adjustments that expose a smattering of insensitivity within our political class. It is unfortunate that the National Assembly does not seem to realise the weight of its place in the Nigerian democracy system. Rather than carry itself in dignity, the Assembly’s affinity for personal aggrandizement has always overstepped the great good that it is meant to deliver to Nigerians. Honestly, the biggest argument against the National Assembly is its lack of awareness of its basic functions and the gross indiscipline it cannot seem to grow out of, like the spots on a leopard.
In a country where teaching hospitals hardly receive N15bn of public funds, how does the National Assembly justify allocating lawmakers N125bn, as appropriated in 2017?
Rather than reduce profligacy and its semblance, the National Assembly chose to take the tone-deaf action of jacking up its budget by N14.5bn, for 2018.
In plain terms, your lawmakers did not only raise their budget, they severely cut allocations meant for education, health and public infrastructure. This demands our collective, civil outrage because in a country still wet from the waves of recessions, this isn’t justifiable, by any means.
There has been a lot of contention on how far the National Assembly can, and should go, in adjusting Nigeria’s budgets. Can it reduce or increase allocations for line items? Can it add new projects and vote funds for it? I think it is time the Executive seeks definite answers from the Supreme Court on this, and speedily too. In my view, the legislature has a right to tamper with the budget to any length, as it is indeed a piece of legislation, and under their purview. However, there are rules and democratic norms – implicit attitudes and values that make democracies function. Because the National Assembly can tamper with the budget does not mean it can go ahead and add over 6,000 projects as has been done. Unless detailed reasons, cost analyses and public debates foreshadowed these decisions, what we are seeing is a preposterous and outright abuse of power.
Beyond legal actions, there are other ways to resolve this perennial problem. Nigeria’s style of government is quite similar to US Presidential system and unfortunately, the US isn’t doing well too, as regards Executive-Legislature partnership when it comes to the budget. The US legislature entirely writes the budget, as the president’s estimates are only taken as his guide for the administration. If Nigeria falls into the same pit of legislative antics affecting budget timelines and content, the consequences our economy would face would outweigh the US economy, mainly because our level of development is at great divergence to the US.
This budget imbroglio is often the hallmark of presidential systems. In the parliamentary system run by the British, the budget is a reflection of the party manifesto and its allies. Ideally, the budget does not exist in isolation; it is the product of a defined policy direction. Here, it is easy for the budget to be drawn from the party’s agenda not the Prime Ministers’ short-term thinking.
Now, think of Western Nigeria in the 1960s, when most projects and programmes (free education, University of Ife, Cocoa House) transcended the reign of the region’s leader Obafemi Awolowo because they were ideas of the party – Action Group. Despite the crisis with his successor, S.L Akintola, these projects didn’t stop.
Fast-forward to today, where despite a majority of his own party in both Houses, the President has not been able to rally lawmakers towards a common vision. Possibly, it’s time to rethink the entire budget system, also within states. The budget process cannot remain as dysfunctional as it is at sub-national level, where it is mostly a rubber-stamping event. Otherwise, it can also go into more risky territory as being seen within the ranks of the National Assembly.
Rather than recognise the federal government’s role as the key pivot for huge projects, the National Assembly is expanding microprojects, overlapping into the terrain of the functions of Local Government Areas and states, enabling its own brand of projects-done-for-votes, locally known as “stomach infrastructure.” Current research by our Tracka program showed that 65% of the constituency projects is tied to nebulous stomach infrastructure projects that reinforce beggarly attitude from the grassroots. In a recent, brazen example of this trend, Femi Gbajabiamila, the House of Representatives Majority Leader, appropriated a public project and named buses, tricycles and motorcycles after himself, calling it “Gbaja Rides.”
Therefore, the biggest challenge to the 2018 budget is the incoming election and the reality that most line items inserted in the budgets – either the rural roads, provision of boreholes or “empowerment” programs written down – will be part of the ongoing practice to use the public treasury to curry favour and buy votes in 2019.
The word on the lips of legislators is that the newly recovered $322.5m Abacha Loot is positioned to be spent on poor Nigerians by the Executive. This is in a country without adequate comprehensive personal datasets along economic classes.
The unfortunate thing about Nigeria’s public financial management system is that it is similar to the ubiquitous open bowl seen in most homes; the bowl where everyone dips in and takes a share at will, until literally nothing is left.
Every now and then, news reports raise the alarm: Governors write themselves security votes that range from N400m-N1bn monthly; Ministers and heads of parastatals sit on and mismanage huge overheads, while the National Assembly takes its own cut through bogus allowances and underhand constituency project deals. In the end, Nigeria’s parasitic political class benefits from a budget system that leaves them well-fed and serviced, whilst citizens are in a perpetually disadvantaged state.
It is the underlying, warped psychology that public funds are free for all and budget line items are carved for personal interests that must be tackled. This will happen only happen under uniformly responsible leadership, radical transparency and strong institutions. In an ideal world, Mr President would decide to freeze implementation on inserted items and submit a supplementary budget. In a vibrant democracy, constant dialogue between the Budget Office and the Appropriation committees should be the norm, so that all allocations are aligned to a common vision.
Without the foregoing, Nigeria remains a country that is destined to ask itself the ugly truths soon, when the fiscal centre will no longer hold.
Oluseun Onigbinde is the Lead Partner of BudgIT, a civic organization that holds government to account
