United in their resolve to return the country to the January-December budget cycle, the National Assembly and the executive arm of government have taken pragmatic steps to actualise the dream. Nigeria was accustomed to this sequence of public expenditure until the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1999 when the two arms involved in budget preparation and approval brought distortion to bear on the ritual due to a slew of fraud, conspiracy and incompetence.
Fortunately, the President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, has vowed to end the trend of budget delays. He has repeatedly advised the Presidency to present the 2020 Appropriation Bill on time so that it could be passed before lawmakers proceed on Christmas break. The drive headlined a recent meeting between President Muhammadu Buhari and principal officers of NASS. The former gave them assurances; and agencies have been mobilised to deliver. The document may be submitted as soon as lawmakers resume from their vacation.
The President on May 26 signed the 2019 N8.3 trillion budget, which he had forwarded to the legislature on December 19, 2018. Those of 2016 and 2017 followed the same trajectory of being signed on May 6 and June 12 of the fiscal year respectively. Earlier fiscal years were not different, resulting in the Presidency and the parliament passing the buck against each other. Both are culpable.
Delayed passage of budgets has done incalculable harm to the economy over the years. Infrastructure projects, which catalyse economic developments, suffer most with late implementation. Local investments are delayed as investors tarry to see how their businesses could be affected. This malaise cripples jobs and wealth creation.
According to CSEA Africa, the country’s economy suffers 2.5 per cent depression whenever the budget is delayed. Its implementation is always chaotic, which ultimately leads to the subversion of its objectives. The full weight of the late passage of budgets is expressed in the decision to roll over 60 per cent of the 2019 budget into that of 2020. The Minister of Labour and Productivity, Chris Ngige, who hinted at this, added that ministers knew of it during the recent presidential retreat for ministers-designate.
While people may be rhapsodic about the possible return to the cherished old order, many countries have even gone beyond annual budgeting by embracing three years or more budget cycles. The shift makes for better national planning and massive injection of funds into critical infrastructure areas. The Russian Duma (parliament) in 2018, for example, passed the 2019 to 2021 budget with $62 billion surplus, according to The Moscow Times. Australia also runs a multi-year budget cycle.
As a critical tool for development, Nigeria’s budgets have failed completely. The executive has never got it right even in formulating them. The practice over the years has been the adoption of the envelope budgeting system – cap on an amount each ministry, department and agency spends in a fiscal year – instead of an outlay based on needs. The prevailing system, therefore, encourages syndicates in the MDAs to devise fraudulent ways and means to replicate expenditure items such as computers, air conditioners, cutlery, office furniture, kitchen equipment and vehicles annually. It enabled about 55 agencies to have up to 276 curious items in their budget in 2016, costing about N145 billion.
Even smart bureaucrats try to outwit ministers, which they sometimes succeed in pulling off. But in the case of the then Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, he stopped them in their tracks when he disowned a strange N2 billion that crept into the ministry’s budget in 2017 as he went to the Senate to defend it. “That is not what we submitted. We did not submit that proposal,” he had argued.
A similar incredulity had earlier reared its ugly head in 2016, when the Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, withdrew the ministry’s budget for proper screening on account of the discovery that the N15.7 billion for capital projects was moved to other areas. Funds were allocated to projects, which no final decisions had been taken, he lamented. Regrettably, the government has done nothing to flush out of the system these fraudsters in the budgeting process.
Lawmakers, indeed, orchestrate more of these absurdities. At issue has always been the extent to which they could exercise their powers of appropriation as expressed in the 1999 Constitution in Section 80, subsections 1-4. In two decades, this power has been recklessly abused with the injection of their constituency projects – boreholes, town halls, rural electrification, rural roads rehabilitation, speed boats and markets – into the budget. Every President has fought against this vexatious scheme, which instigates face-off with the lawmakers. As a result, each budget passed is subjected to more than a month of vetting by the executive to sort out the grey areas, which prolongs presidential assent the more. Clearly, constituency projects are not items in the Exclusive Legislative List.
Budget IT – a not-for-profit organisation – that tracks budget implementation to ensure value-for-money, has exposed the scheme as stark fraud in its reports. This was how the 2018 budget of N8.61 trillion was raised to N9.12 trillion, with lawmakers’ introduction of 6,404 projects of their own, which amounted to N578 billion. They deducted funds from the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge and others to fund their selfish agenda.
Public budgeting process has undergone a rigorous transformation globally. The National Assembly should ensure that national budgeting is used to promote economic growth, stimulate employment and foster income distribution. Lawan and other leaders of the National Assembly should not just be satisfied with the executive arm’s early presentation of the budget, but should think seriously of how to get rid of this notorious annual roulette of lawmakers mangling the appropriation bill for selfish reasons.
