A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and former member of the House of Representatives, Dr Ehiogie West-Idahosa, shares his thoughts on the recurring issue of National Assembly members adding items to the budget estimate before passage.
Excerpts:
Is it right for members of the National Assembly to add items to the budget presented to them by the executive?
The budget is a national instrument, which belongs to the people of Nigeria but which is prepared and presented by the government of Nigeria. That we make allegations of budget padding every year speaks to our undeveloped democracy, because these things are avoidable. If the executive and legislature would learn to harmonise their inputs into the national budget before it is presented, we won’t have this issue. Why can’t the legislative committees play an influential role in what gets into the national budget before it is brought before the National Assembly? So, I think this lack of unison of purpose has resulted in this practice, which is now being referred to as budget padding.
Do you imply that the failure to harmonise makes it right?
There are two forms of padding; nationalistic and very nepotistic padding. Nationalistic padding is the one made in national interest. Take the second Niger Bridge as an example. Assuming the legislature wanted the funding level to get up to a certain limit and the executive said no and the legislature in defiance decided to raise the funding because they want the project completed quickly in order to ease traffic congestion around that area, that would be nationalistic padding, and no one can blame them for such, given that it was done in national interest.
I think the padding people don’t want to hear about and the type we former lawmakers don’t want to contemplate at all is the nepotistic padding, which is founded in corruption and ethnicity. Two examples: you imagine a state that is already overloaded with tertiary institutions – and some of the institutions cannot even function optimally because the state government cannot support them with allocation from the federal – yet they are asking for more because everybody wants a university in their backyard.
For that reason, a lawmaker who is influential or a principal officer decides that everything is done to create a university in their area and then they use our collective wealth to boost their ego. They put in the budget an amount insufficient for the take-off of that university. He takes glory for it, but he knows that he has neither fulfilled the ambition of a realistic university nor achieved anything, but they take the advantage of being in the parliament to continue to put some half-hearted measures of funding a project that is dead on arrival. That is a nepotistic and ethnically-founded padding.
What is the second type?
The second type under this is to create fictitious projects; we found many of those even in our time. I remember in 2005 when we expunged many of such projects to the tune of about N20bn. With consultations with the executive, we moved the funds to Immigration, Customs and other agencies. That led to the massive employment in those paramilitary organisations during that period. I am an apostle of nationalistic padding, like increasing the vote of an agency to procure more equipment. But I’m against fictitious addition of projects for the financial benefit of the concerned lawmakers. It is criminal and those involved should face the wrath of the law.
The lawmakers have constituency projects, why do they need to add to the national budget again?
This is a very controversial area. If you look at constituency projects, they are usually called for from lawmakers during the period the budget is being worked on. I imagine they may even have a committee that deals with that by now. This committee charged with collating the constituency projects of members normally do that and hand over to the appropriate agency of the Federal Government for input into the national budget. What happens and where they are getting it wrong is that they then allow these members to have a say on who the contractors are. That is where the problem is.
We also nominated constituency projects but you won’t see the name of some of us on the projects. We submitted the projects and took a walk. As far as I was concerned, I had performed my duty to my constituency and the next thing was for them to make sure that whoever was assigned to do the job came to site while we monitored the execution of the project to specification. Why should a lawmaker put in a project for the benefit of their constituency and he goes ahead to nominate the contractor who is his friend or tends to share the money with him? This is where corrupt practice rubs such legislators of the credit which they ought to get from bringing in valuable constituency projects into their constituency.
What is the procedure followed before these projects are added to the budget?
For example, your community needs a connecting bridge with another community and it is known that the problem exists. Usually, such project is inserted into the budget after serious lobbying; you make your case, bring video tapes to show evidence, get community leaders to make formal requests to show that there is a necessity, you speak to the appropriation committee and principal officers and everyone sees the need for the project to be in the budget, there is nothing wrong with that project making it to the budget and that is why the lawmaker was elected.
The President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), said about 6,576 projects were added to the 2022 budget estimate by the National Assembly, some people believe that instead of adding the projects by themselves, they should rather lobby the concerned ministry to add them.
What do you think?
If you take away national padding, you take away the power of the legislature. National padding is a global legislative practice. Anywhere in the world, lawmakers will never fail to take advantage of the power of the purse, which is the strongest power of the legislature. In this context, we are talking about the parliamentary control of the national budget, which should not be confused with the misuse of that privilege by some lawmakers.
That the privilege is misused by lawmakers does not make it a national practice of reckoning. That was why I said the problem was the misuse for personal interest. Our lawmakers get good allowance and they have no reason to look for more money through questionable means. Let us reverse the trend; come up with projects of national interest, which I call national padding and nobody will quarrel with that, unlike when there are fictitious projects. – Culled from Punch.
