Despite signing the 2018 Appropriation Bill into law late on June 2, after its presentation to the parliament on November 7, 2017, the President has yet to forward the 2019 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly. This has set the stage for the delay cycle to continue. It might even be worse, given the forthcoming general election. It is an inevitability that the Senate of 109 members inadvertently showcased on November 13, when it could not sit for lack of a quorum.
This dual sketch of abnegation of responsibility puts in context the recent blame game between the Executive and the Parliament on delay in budget consideration each year. The budget is a critical tool for economic development; therefore, any delay in its implementation hurts the economy and this has been the country’s fate since the Fourth Republic began.
President Muhammadu Buhari rekindled this concern last week when he expressed his disappointment at the seven months it took the National Assembly to consider the 2018 budget. Taking this into consideration, he said his administration deserved commendation for what it had achieved so far in terms of implementation.
It was a dig at the lawmakers, which the Senate Minority Leader, Abiodun Olujimi, did not allow the President to get away with. She shot back, citing the untidiness of budgets and ministers’ ignorance of provisions in their ministries as reasons why approvals cannot be expeditiously done. In one instance, the senator said the Minister of Information and Culture denied the provisions made for the purchase of computers in the ministry as packaged. “This kind of disconnect between budget proposals and the position of the heads of Ministries, Department and Agencies made the National Assembly to insist on budget defence by the heads of the MDAs,” she said.
In point of fact, there is a clear absence of rigour or planning in our budgeting, evident in the duplication of items in the budget of a single ministry; and return of items like computers, office furniture, vehicles, cutlery and plates that reappear in the budget every year. For no other reason than to defraud the treasury, about 55 agencies had up to 276 curious items in their budget in 2016, costing about N145 billion.
The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, disowned the strange N2 billion that crept into the ministry’s budget in 2017 under the expenditure – Regional Housing Scheme. He reiterated, “That is not what we submitted. We did not submit that proposal.” The Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, faced a bigger challenge in 2016, when he withdrew the purported budget of the ministry for proper screening. The N15.7 billion for capital projects of the ministry was discovered to have been moved to other areas, just as funds were allocated to projects on which no final decisions had been taken.
Therefore, the Executive is as guilty as the Legislature. On many occasions, the President harped on the need to return the country to the January to December fiscal cycle. But it has been difficult to accomplish in the past two decades, thus fostering chaos in the execution of socio-economic policies and corruption. If the government is serious about reversing the trend, it should demonstrate discipline and embrace the deliberate policy of submitting the Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly in September, to give it three clear months for consideration. In the United States and the United Kingdom, budgets for programmes in some critical sectors like defence are passed two or three years ahead. A radical overhaul of our Ministry of Budget and National Planning and its adjunct – the Budget Office – has become imperative to ensure that only technically competent personnel at all levels are in charge to drive the country’s budgetary process. It is unfortunate that despite the Buhari government’s initial preference for the “zero budgeting” system, which is based on need, reduces corruption and fosters value-for-money, it has been abandoned for the usual “envelope budgeting” or incremental allocation of funds. This lacks transparency and promotes graft.
Besides the proven tardiness and disorderliness from the Executive arm, the lawmakers usually compound the mess with their budget “padding.” They sometimes abandon the document in an attempt to settle scores with the President. For instance, it is difficult to explain why the 2018 budget that was submitted on November 7 last year was not touched until late February this year – meaning, four months were lost.
Since 1999, budget standoff has become a constant noxious element in the relationship between the President and the federal lawmakers; so bad that some former Presidents faced impeachment threats. In the current budget, for instance, the lawmakers increased the size from N8.61 trillion to N9.12 trillion; introduced 6,404 projects of their own, which amounted to N578 billion; and slashed funds from national projects such as the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge to fund their constituency projects like boreholes, town halls, markets, building of rural roads and electrification and purchase of water boats.
Instructively, these projects are never conceptualised, designed and cost-valued; neither are they integral parts of the budget of any MDA. The engagement is purely a clever way to sidetrack due process in the award of contracts. As a result, each President has dithered in signing the budget once strange items are added by lawmakers.
However, a solution to this annual gridlock lies in a judicial pronouncement. The Executive should take the initiative. Clearly, no one doubts the Parliament’s power on appropriation as enshrined in Sections 80 and 81 of the 1999 Constitution. But the limits of that power should be tested, given its obvious abuse by selfish lawmakers with their perennial insertion of contract items, which clash with the Exclusive Legislative List and saddle the central government with projects that are statutorily for local governments to execute.
