Recent events have forced the country to face up to the growing menace of “constituency projects” and how legislators contribute to impoverishing Nigerians. President Muhammadu Buhari railed against the squandering of over N1 trillion in 10 years through the vote, while the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission ramped up its exposure of embedded fraud and looted property. And in the light of the audacious move to legitimise the scam, Buhari and the civil society need steely resolve to oppose the Constituency Development Fund Bill introduced in the Senate.
Buhari was unsparing in his remarks at a summit on corruption organised by ICPC where he said the N1 trillion appropriated by federal lawmakers for the so-called constituency projects in a decade had not impacted positively on the lives of ordinary Nigerians. ICPC investigations of constituency projects in 12 states spread across the six geo-political zones also revealed flagrant abuses. Tractors, tricycles, grinding machines, motorcycles and electricity transformers were among items recovered from some senators and members of the House of Representatives. Ostensibly for distribution to their constituents, lawmakers brazenly deployed public funds to buy loyalty and votes while personalising the projects. Some were alleged to have registered front companies to whom contracts were awarded and, according to Bolaji Owasanoye, the Chairman of ICPC, many projects were never executed even after contract sums were paid. Legislators’ defence has been that less than 50 per cent of budgeted sums were released.
The constituency projects scandal has been a constant blight since the Fourth Republic got under way in 1999. Lawmakers perpetually distort the annual budget proposals by unilaterally adding constituency projects to the president’s draft. They move funds from critical projects, insert trivia into the headings and sub-headings of ministries, departments and agencies and this is one major motive for their raising the oil price anchor proposed by the Executive. About N100 billion was once moved from other headings to cater for the constituency projects. Unlike successive presidents who have similarly lamented this usurpation of the Executive function but stopped short of resistance to the end, Buhari should leverage the considerable influence of his office to end the charade.
The time is now or never before the constituency fund bill becomes law. It seeks to establish a Constituency Development Fund to which 2.5 per cent of the national budget will be dedicated to be managed by the Rural Development Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Resources. This removes execution and monitoring from the MDAs to Constituency Development Project Advisory Committees to be set up in each federal constituency and senatorial district. The National Assembly aims thus to outwit the Executive and the perennial face-off over constituency projects and its funding that occurs virtually every year, delaying budget passage and producing spending plans the government has always found impossible to fully implement.
Nigeria cannot afford this travesty. The International Parliamentary Union argues that while parliaments are “indispensable institutions of representative democracy”, their primary role is to make laws and ensure that public policy is “informed by the people on whose lives they impact.” Constituency development funds and projects supervised by lawmakers are wrong and unsuited for a federal polity struggling to build strong institutional capacity. A study by the International Budget Partnership concluded that CDFs “have a negative impact on accountability and service delivery that most poor countries cannot afford.”
First, countries adopting them failed to undertake research on their impact in India, Pakistan and the Philippines where costs and abuse have ballooned. In Zambia, costs rose from 60 million kwacha in 2006 to 660 million kwacha in 2010; in Kenya where it was introduced in 2003 to take 2.5 per cent of the budget, it has been revised to take 3.5 per cent and is wracked by corruption allegations. At least 23 countries, including Nigeria, are recorded by IBP to have adopted or are considering adopting CDFs. Significantly; they are mostly Third World, often fragile, democracies.
While its proponents argue that CDFs CDPs help spread development to the grass roots, bypass cumbersome bureaucracies and help MPs respond to the demands of their constituents, the case against them is more compelling as studies have found that incumbents use them to influence elections, are poorly monitored and distort planning. These projects in Nigeria also violate due process rules of the public procurement law.
Besides, the principle of separation of powers, bedrock of democracy, is violated; the Legislature is to enact spending law and conduct oversight, while the Executive implements. Lawmakers overturn this by getting directly involved in project implementation. In mature democracies, lawmakers only engage in “pork barrel” measures by influencing policies and projects that favour their constituencies. In the United States, legislators are motivated by policies that boost the local economy and create jobs.
Besides, the projects are often best suited to local councils. Constitutionally, the Federal Government has no business with community viewing centres, culverts, wells, boreholes or distributing sewing machines to market women, items absent from the Exclusive and Concurrent legislative lists in the 1999 Constitution. And like the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, pointed out, projects must first be evaluated, costs determined and, where applicable, land and titles negotiated before they are budgeted for. He said 1,170 new items were inserted into the budget of the then Power, Works and Housing Ministry in 2017.
When a lawmaker plans and oversees a project, who then conducts oversight, a basic parliamentary function? According to IBP, constituency projects compromise both the lawmaking and oversight functions and even the ideal relationship with the electorate by placing the lawmaker in a position to dispense favours, thereby weakening accountability to voters.
Buhari has the popular backing to resist this trend; he should not shirk his responsibility. Civil society groups should step up their sensitisation and mobilisation, including organising class-action suits, to resist this brigandage. The ICPC should step up its investigations and doggedly uncover the fraud associated with constituency projects, go beyond recovery and prosecute all offenders. The people should make their voices heard and demonstrate their opposition to legislative tyranny.
