The scandalous spectacle called ‘2016 Federal Budget’ proposal resonated a couple of days ago when President Muhammadu Buhari formally declared that the document was padded by entrenched interests. Buhari spoke through his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, in Saudi Arabia. “…It is very embarrassing and disappointing. We will not allow those who did it to go unpunished”, he said. The President had presented a budget proposal of N6.08 trillion to a joint Session of the National Assembly for approval on December 22, 2015; made up of N4.2 trillion (70%) recurrent expenditure and N1.8 trillion (30%) capital expenditure components. The revenue projection was N3.86 trillion, meaning the budget was in deficit of N2.22 trillion, which the President originally hoped to finance with domestic and foreign borrowing to the tunes of N984 billion and N900 billion, respectively. Initially, critics of the budget were mainly piqued by the budget’s deficit threshold and some expenditure heads generally considered as non-prioritised, frivolous or profligate.
They included the N3.89 billion capital allocation for State House Clinic, when a paltry N2.67 billion was the capital vote for hospitals nationwide; the roughly N3.7 billion set aside for the purchase of vehicles for the Presidency, whereas the President was critical of the Senate for voting N4.7 billion for posh cars for its operations; N39 billion for the President’s local and international travels and transportation as against the N24.4billion voted for same in 2015; N362 million for Wildlife Conservation against N24. 6 million for the same purpose last year; and purchase of presidential canteen materials and kitchen equipment for N89 million in 2016 against the N83.1 million allocated to the sub-head in 2015, among others. More revelations, nonetheless, emerged during budget defense sessions at the National Assembly.
The Senate discovered, for instance, that the sum of N10 billion was smuggled into the budget of the Federal Ministry of Education; while the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, bluntly said the document before the National Assembly as his ministry’s budget proposal was different from what originated from the ministry. The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, likewise revealed that the provision of N398 million made for the purchase of computers for some of the agencies under his ministry was strange to him; while the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Pastor Usani Usani Uguru, washed his hands off the allocation for his ministry. In one particular instance, the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation uncovered N180 million double capital allocations to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) in the said budget; in addition to unveiling that NIMET earned revenue in dollars and remitted naira to the Federation Account without disclosing how much dollar it earned and at what exchange rate.
It was in the middle of the scam that President Buhari sacked the Director-General for Budget, Mr. Yaya Gusau, and announced his immediate replacement with Mr. Tijjani Abdullahi. The scandal has no doubt been a source of grave embarrassment to the Buhari administration and its zero-tolerance for corruption posturing. Same goes for the nation and its international image. It has by the same token also exposed the primitive conspiracy of the bureaucracy in consciously constructing corrupt loopholes for leakages and huge financial losses to the nation. Who knows what would have transpired if there was no change in government; and if the National Assembly was to be less vigilant? Indeed, reports indicated that a review carried out by the Efficiency Unit recently set up by the Federal Ministry of Finance to streamline government overhead expenditure between 2012 and 2014 revealed that on the average, 60 percent of Federal Government’s overhead expenditure got frittered away through local and international travels, maintenance, local and international training, welfare, office stationary and consumables, honourarium and sitting allowance, meals, refreshment and books, a development that is no less scandalous.
Now at home with all these facts, public expectation is that the Presidency will not just relieve the culprits of their jobs, but carry out a diligent investigation on the activities of the thieving syndicates with a view to aggregating the level of harm they did to the system, plugging the leakages and then make them face the wrath of the law. A country ought to be wept for, where as much as 23,000 ghost workers can be discovered; and where one civil servant alone collects salaries meant for 20 people, within the short period of time the Biometric Verification Number (BVN) has been in operation, as was revealed lately by the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun.
