As usual, the implementation of this year’s budget has hit a tempest. The Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, broached the matter when he signed the N7.44 trillion document into law early in June. But it took the splenetic outburst of the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, to unravel the details. Now, it seems the policy objectives of the budget may not be achieved.
This year, the lawmakers added 100 new roads and slashed funds provided for critical national infrastructure to finance their so-called constituency projects, despite the fact that 200 uncompleted road projects inherited from the previous administration need to be fixed. This perennial disorder has vitiated national development since 1999; and should be arrested without further delay.
In a statement, the minister said his ministry’s budget was replete with primary health centres and boreholes, just as the ongoing rehabilitation of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Second Niger Bridge, Mambilla Power project and the Bodo Bridge linking the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Station will suffer. The N31 billion in the budget meant for the highway was reduced to N10 billion. This means that the contractors, Julius Berger and RCC, already owed N15 billion, would stop work. Funding for the Second Niger Bridge was also reduced from N15 billion to N10 billion.
These are critical infrastructure that will foster rapid economic development if thoroughly executed. But the lawmakers’ unabashed defence of their folly and failure to properly appreciate the importance of these projects raise the question of their eligibility for their positions. Fashola’s salvo that bordered on their “stark and worrisome knowledge” of the budgeting process should not, therefore, be viewed from the prism of an attack, but from the concern for quality legislative representation, without which our democracy will continue to vegetate.
The central issue is where the power of the National Assembly stops in budget consideration. No denying the fact that Section 80 (4) of the 1999 Constitution gives the parliament the power to appropriate after the President might have prepared and laid the budget estimates. However, since the Fourth Republic began in 1999, the exercise of this right has been grossly abused, as the budget is padded annually with petty projects such as boreholes, rural electrification, community roads, health centres, tricycles and town halls. These are items that fall within the schedule of the states and local governments, as distinct from the 68 items in the Exclusive Legislative List in the constitution.
The lawmakers’ misreading of the power of appropriation in the constitution has become a big national concern. This was why five Senior Advocates of Nigeria denounced their perennial mutilation of our budgets. The silks, Femi Falana, Kanyinsola Ajayi, Emeka Ngige, Norrison Quakers and Chijioke Okoli, were unanimous in their view that since the executive implements, it was irrational to saddle it with projects outside of those in its statutory domain. It is also wrong to graft projects that have not gone through the rigour of cost-benefit analysis into the budget.
The parliament should not deceive the public to believe that the Presidency wants it to be a rubber stamp. Far from it. A positive way lawmakers can tinker with the budget is by cutting contract cost based on extant templates for award, once it is established that it has been inflated. It is in this context the abused Section 80 (4) can be properly situated.
However, the lawmakers are deliberately confusing this point with the issue of smuggling in non-federal projects into the budget. Even more worrisome is the fact that they are introduced without regard for due process: feasibility studies, design, transparent prequalification and bidding. Since these projects are alien to the executive arm, it means their evaluation or costs were arbitrarily determined by the lawmakers. This promotes corruption.
From 2004 to 2014, about N900 billion was injected in the budget for constituency projects, according to the immediate past Senate Leader, Mohammed Ndume. He said this in 2014 in his capacity as the chairman, Senate Committee on Millennium Development Goals, at a stakeholders’ forum in Abuja. “The National Assembly usually budgets N100 billion for constituency projects every year since 2004 for the six geopolitical zones….”
The Muhammadu Buhari administration had a taste of this legislative tyranny in 2016, when N100 billion was provided for these shenanigans. It was, however, reduced to N60 billion after a protracted standoff and mediation from a former Senate President, Ken Nnamani, and ex-Speaker, Aminu Masari.
The radical overhaul of the budget that makes it difficult for implementation, we dare say, is reckless and unpatriotic. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007, which creates a meeting ground between the two arms of government in budget preparation, set up the Medium Term Expenditure Framework.
It provides the basis for budget estimates and the Act makes it obligatory for the minister of finance to get the National Assembly’s input. This is always done. However, the distortion conveys parliament’s unilateral, wily and secret rebuff of this fiscal foundation of the budget. This rascality is not in national interest and should be resisted.
A responsive and responsible parliament should be concerned about how to respond to the 2011 report of the Presidential Project Assessment Committee chaired by Bunu Sheriff, which confirmed that over 7,000 projects had been abandoned and would require N11 trillion to be completed. No doubt, the number has been growing since then.
As a result, our federal lawmakers should give a new meaning to budgeting, as a fiscal and policy stimulus for development by abandoning this discredited way of legislative business.
If they do not, the executive should seek the interpretation of Section 80 (4) of the Constitution in the court to settle this niggling craze once and for all.
