As happened last year when the presentation of the 2014 budget was postponed twice and President Goodluck Jonathan had to delegate the minister of finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to eventually put it before the National Assembly (NASS), the prospect of having budget presentation early this year is fast becoming a pipedream. With the House of Representatives declaring a holiday until December 3, it remains to be seen how the business of law making, especially the passage of the Appropriation Bill, will not run into stormy waters. This is made more complex by the fact that electioneering campaigns have taken over the nation’s landscape and political office holders are on the hunt for votes.
These are practical limitations that should have advised early preparation and presentation of the budget. To all intents and purposes, it may take longer than the passage of the same Bill in April this year, if a thorough job is to be done by both the executive and the legislative arms. It is also practically impossible for a serious defence and enactment procedure to take place before the National Assembly vacates again for Christmas and New Year festivities.
We have seen natural fault lines in the federal government’s projection of N4.74trillion for the 2015 fiscal year. This figure was contained in the government’s Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and Fiscal Strategy Paper (FSP) covering the 2014 to 2016 fiscal periods. Much as the projection fulfils a requirement of Section 11 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007, which stipulates that the minister of finance shall prepare the MTEF and FSP and get them approved by the Federal Executive Council and the National Assembly, it falls short of the constitutional desideratum for annual budget. The constitution is emphatic in Section 121 (1) and Section 15(1) of the Fiscal Responsibility Act on the sanctity of the budget, prohibiting payments from the state treasury without an appropriation and makes no exceptions for expenditures for bond payments or “essential services”. Indeed, it is an impeachable offence to make temporary furloughs for state and political employees without recourse to the National Assembly.
We had expected that both arms of government would have learnt from the difference between the last two budgets – one came early, the other late to the NASS. More worrisome are the technicalities involved in the issues of statutory transfers, debt servicing, recurrent and capital expenditure patterns’ projection for oil price. Added to these are challenges peculiar to the nation’s economy within the composite framework of the potential impact of the increasing exploitation of shale oil and gas by major oil importers, the rising oil output by hitherto oil importing countries, and the challenges of oil theft, pipeline vandalism and production shut-ins at our oil mining locations and reduced non-oil revenue. These are issues, in our opinion, that the government, the Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance ought to have worked out before now on the budget issue.
