Scandals have not been in short supply in the House of Representatives since the inception of the Fourth Republic. From certificate forgery to sundry financial improprieties, the country has been grizzling to no end. The ongoing revelations of how the House mangled the 2016 budget to suit the parochial political and pecuniary designs of some of its principal officers and members should give all Nigerians cause for concern.
It is a gross abuse of public office that should not be swept under the carpet. Abdulmumin Jibrin, who chaired the Appropriation Committee of the House that orchestrated the mess, is churning out details of the legislative overdrive, which cost him his position. He is working hard to ensure that his is not the only scalp the scandal would claim.
Just to satisfy their selfish interests, the lawmakers inserted N40 billion worth of the so-called constituency projects in the budget. Jibrin, who has styled himself as an “accidental activist,” wants the leadership purged. To achieve this goal, he has submitted petitions to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, Department of State Services, and the police. He says he has a welter of evidence to prove his 25-point allegation of abuse of office against the Speaker of the House, Yakubu Dogara, his deputy, Chief Whip, and the Minority Leader. He has asked Dogara to resign; but the Speaker demurs.
The contentious issues are how the constituency projects were inserted in the budget and disproportionately distributed to lawmakers’ constituencies; the manipulation of the budget of the Ministries, Agencies and Departments to the favour of some; the N4.16 billion value of projects Jibrin wheeled to his constituency in Kano State; and the corrupt enrichment of some lawmakers as alleged by this latter-day whistle blower.
The ruling All Progressives Congress, as embarrassed as the Presidency, has directed both Dogara and Jibrin to keep their mouths shut after its separate debriefings of the duo. But Jibrin is baying for blood. Dogara has not made the matter easier for himself with his naïve and careless response to the entire saga. After his meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari last Friday, he said that budget-padding was not an offence. It is a sickening snap for which Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Transparency Group of lawmakers in the House and other Nigerians have excoriated him.
Feeling cheated, the enraged lawmakers have asked the Speaker to explain how zonal intervention projects in three senatorial districts and 12 federal constituencies in Bauchi State amounted to N1.6 billion, as against N3.07 billion allocated to his own federal constituency. According to them, this is in addition to the N4.78 billion worth of capital projects he sited in his constituency, out of the N9.23 billion provided for the entire state. These issues, they argue, clearly border on breach of federal character principle and public trust.
Consequently, it is an assault on our collective intelligence for the Speaker to dismiss the budget distortion scandal as a non-issue. His action is sheer grandstanding. Against the backdrop of his denial, one of his predecessors, Ghali Na’Abba, in an interview, tellingly said, “If any item of expenditure is added behind other members, then that item can be said to be illegal; and it can be called padding.” The country cannot continue to have a group of law breakers as lawmakers. Jibrin may have been enamoured of the recklessness of the principal officers, to also indulge in the illegality that earned him a reprimand and eventual revolt of his colleagues.
However, as Jibrin’s broadside fired at Dogara and his team’s excesses underscored, “there is a limit to appropriation.” The misguided notion that the sole authority to approve a budget, also confers on the legislators the right to stuff it with their benefits – finances and projects – is the nemesis appropriation bills are subjected to annually. But the mess has to stop. A budget is a financial framework of revenue estimates and expenditures, which only the executive arm of government is in a better stead to appreciate. This is why the 1999 Constitution vests in the President, in Section 81 (1), the power to prepare and lay the budget before the National Assembly.
Before now, we had noted that the constituency project was a veritable conduit for pillaging the public treasury. Between 2004 and 2014, a whopping N900 billion was provided in the budget for this purpose, according to Mohammed Ndume, who spoke on this matter in 2014, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Millennium Development Goals. Projects captured in 2015 and 2016 have certainly shot the figure beyond N1 trillion.
Given the way the projects are conceived and executed, the contracts bypass all known indices of transparency and due process as encapsulated in the Public Procurement Act passed by the parliament. It is not surprising, therefore, that 2,399 of them were abandoned in 2013, said the then Minister of Special Duties, Aminu Turaki. Such waste has spiked since then.
This sore should not be allowed to fester every year. The APC-led government, in tandem with its preachment of national rebirth, should not cover up the noxious fumes from the House. People like Governor Aminu Tambuwal, the President’s two Senior Special Assistants on National Assembly Matters, Ita Enang and Ismail Kawu, who have dismissed Jibrin’s claim, should steer clear of the matter. The President should spurn advice from them as they are Dogara’s immediate past colleagues. If they want to help Buhari clean up the system, they should challenge Jibrin to prove his allegations. As a former Chairman of the Appropriation Committee with knowledge of “wasteful projects” embedded in the budget, his allegations cannot simply be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The APC and Buhari should not support this blatant act of corruption.
Buhari did smell a rat when the budget was submitted to him without the details, and he temporarily withheld his assent. Now that providence has exhumed this concealed rot, ignoring it will amount to hypocrisy. It is legislative recklessness such as this that rekindles calls for a unicameral legislature. Let us acutely reflect on this again!
