With barely three weeks left in the first quarter, Nigerians watch incredulously as the executive and the legislative arms bicker to no end on the 2018 budget. Like Budget 2017 which would not become operative until June when it was signed into law, indications are that things would not be too different. Early in the month, the Senate had accused the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, of delaying the passage of the budget. Its vice-chairman, appropriation committee, Sunny Ogbuoji, during plenary would inform the parliament that the committee was having difficulty harmonising their report on the budget.
“Most of the sub-committees (on the 2018 budget) have huge challenges with the MDAs because majority of them are not coming forward to interface with them,” he said.
Penultimate Sunday, Ben Akabueze, director-general of budget office, refuted the claim. While asserting that President Muhammadu Buhari submitted the budget with all the usual details required by the National Assembly to process it, he insisted that “ministers and heads of agencies have made themselves available to explain and defend the budget,” adding that “Given the seriousness the presidency attaches to getting the 2018 budget passed so it could earnestly focus on achieving the goals set out in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP), 2017-20 which formed the basis of the budget, it had directed heads of ministries and extra-ministerial agencies to attend to any requests for meetings/information by the National Assembly (NASS) with despatch.
“To the best of our knowledge, this directive has been complied with,” he said; although he would in the same breadth, admit that “complaints about additional information with respect to the budgets of government-owned agencies (GOEs) are being addressed”.
There can be no looking far to see the truth. Neither side, as far as we can see, can claim to be telling the whole truth. Between and executive branch notorious for tardiness and bumbling incompetence and the lawmakers with their shameless predilection for promoting group-interest over and above national interests, the truth about the corporate dereliction obviously lies in-between.
The tragedy of course is that the development has become the pattern in the fourth republic. If we had expected the change administration, which incidentally controls the executive and the legislative branches, to beat a different path, it has been more of the same with every cycle of budget since its inception – just as acrimonious if not more. Where the executive has not been needlessly tardy, sometimes obdurate, to the point of abdicating the duty of timely defence when called by the parliament to do so, the National Assembly would insist on refashioning the budget in its own image.
Truth be said, it is hard to gloss over the alert last November by Senate spokesman, Aliyu Sabi, over an alleged refusal by heads of key agencies to honour the body’s invitation to discuss the budget. Earlier, the same Senate had accused the executive of inexplicable delay in the submission of the 2018 to 2020 Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP). This is why the claim by the DG, Budget Office regarding the complaints of the lawmakers being addressed is not only hollow but mischievous.
If only for the sake of the still-fragile economy, we call on both arms of government to seek the path of amity. Despite the modest recovery in oil prices, the economy currently is still managing to limp, hobbled by the yawning infrastructure gap as a result of which the quest for diversification has remained herculean.
Already, there are real bases to fear that the modest Gross Domestic Product growth rate projected by the International Monetary Fund (2.1 percent) and the World Bank (2.5 percent) for the current year may turn out to be an illusion. Should that happen, it will constitute an intolerable self-inflicted pain – smacking of criminal irresponsibility.
