Budget 2017 and return of padding – Punch

Budget mishmash in 2016 caused the Federal Government a big embarrassment. There were assurances that the mess would not be repeated. But the demon is very much with the 2017 budget, going by a revelation from the Senate last week during a ministerial budget defence of the N7.29 trillion proposal. In his budget defence, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola,  faced the discomfiture of explaining how a strange N2 billion crept into the ministry’s budget, under the expenditure sub-head: “Regional Housing Scheme.” This is outside the N41.9 billion allocated to the National Housing Programme in the budget.  “It is not our project…It is a Ministry of Finance initiative…That is not what we submitted. We did not submit that proposal,” Fashola explained.

Government must be made more accountable for what it achieves with taxpayers’ money. Clearly, the ugly scene speaks volumes about how our national budget is mangled annually by those who are expected to guarantee its integrity. Last year, Fashola’s counterpart in the Ministry of Health, Isaac Adewole, withdrew the purported budget of the ministry to purge it of its strange elements when he discovered that crooks had moved N15.7 billion for capital projects to other areas, just as funds were set aside for projects on which no final decisions had been taken just yet. This year again, about 55 agencies have up to 276 curious items in their budgets, costing about N145 billion, according to a media report.

This is aside from the annual bazaar in the National Assembly budget, for which a member of the House of Representatives, Abdulmumin Jibrin, said last year, “There is a limit to appropriation.” For daring to expose how the leadership inserted N40 billion projects then, he was slammed with a 180-day legislative suspension.

Good governance starts with a transparent budgeting process. It is much easier to control government expenditures at the “upstream” point of budget preparation than later during the execution of the budget. But the federal budget serially suffers a tripartite assault from the Executive, Legislature and the corrupt bureaucracy. The criminality comes in different guises: inexplicable expenditure subheads; bloated overhead costs, duplication of items, annual provision for frivolous items like computers, utensils, furniture and vehicles often found in State House, National Assembly and the MDAs budgets. President Muhammadu Buhari’s revulsion at last year’s budget debacle made him to vow as the 2017 budget was about being presented that “budget padding” would not happen again on his watch. “They don’t want to reflect on the situation in which we are economically; they want to live the same way; they simply want business as usual,” Buhari said.

Budget planning and preparation should be at the heart of good public expenditure management.Disturbingly, both the Ministry of Budget and National Planning and the Budget Office have yet to exhibit the rigour and capacity required to effectively curb this perennial violence to our annual budget. Changing the status quo, therefore, will need more than removing the Director-General of Budget Office, which the Presidency did last year, when it brought the incumbent, Ben Akabueze, on board after the 2016 mess. There should be a radical overhaul of the office.

There is an urgent need to change budget practices and procedures. The soundness of budget systems, according to the International Monetary Fund, can be judged by its comprehensiveness, transparency and realism. It is doubtful if our budgeting system meets any of these criteria. The promise by the Vice-President, Yemi Osinbajo, in September 2015 that the Federal Government would introduce results-oriented approaches to budgeting and management has apparently not materialised. According to him, through the zero-based budgeting, the Federal Government will focus on a bottom-up approach to development. Zero-based budgeting, according to an online publication, Investopedia, is a method of budgeting in which all expenses must be justified for each new period.

No system of budget execution or cash planning can do more than mitigate the problems caused by poor quality or unrealistic budget preparation.The consequence of the infamy partly tells the story of our underdevelopment. The World Bank says a well-functioning public sector delivers quality public services consistent with citizen preferences and fosters private market-led growth, while managing fiscal resources prudently is considered critical to poverty alleviation and the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Nigerians, especially civil society organisations, should show greater interest in public finance. In September 1996, Susheela Devi, a woman from rural India and a mother of three with little formal education, put it beautifully when she was asked why she attended a convention on the right to information:  “When I send my child to the market with 10 rupees to buy something, I demand an account of the money I have given him when he returns home. Similarly, when the government spends my money, I have the right to ask for an accounting of these expenditures.”