Will you believe that Mr. President’s discovery of the clever sneaking in of projects into the 2016 appropriation bill amounting to nearly a quarter of the budget is merely scratching the surface of the economic sabotage activities of civil servants?
Most Nigerians will be shocked to learn that in cohort with civil servants, it is indeed contractors who prepare Nigeria’s budget.
Here is how it is works: Typically, a contractor working with civil servants puts a proposal for the building or expansion of the State House Clinic or supply of Conference Visitors Unit vehicles together. The contractor co-opts the head of the bureaucracy in the ministry who is the Permanent Secretary, whose duty is to convince the minister, who is a politician, to buy into the proposal. Once the assent of the minister or head of the agency is secured, in toe with the civil servant who has been armed with the project details, the public servants proceed to the National Assembly, to defend the budget. Some contractors even go further to “lobby” the relevant legislators for support in the passage of the “proposal of interest” without reduction of the assigned costs. In some cases, the cost is jacked up to include the financial interests of the parliamentarian or parliamentarians who “guard” the proposal through the budgetary process to ensure that nothing that would warrant removal of the project or result in cost reduction, happens.
So, from the scenario above, invariably, it is the contractor who does the ground work and thus produces Nigeria’s budget. In other words, Nigeria’s budget is more or less an assemblage of myriads of proposals by a plethora of contractors and not the brain child of civil servants as we are led to believe. Civil servants only put the veneer to make it look elegant before laying it before the legislative arm of government whose duty it is to appropriate our national resources.
As sordid and absurd as the foregoing revelations appear, that’s the honest truth.
Now, l have read in the media where the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Appropriation, Jubril Abdulmumim, took exceptions to allegations that legislators were complicit in “padding” budgets. His umbrage is a mere “corporate speak” as he and his colleagues are cognisant of the truth, otherwise it will be assumed that the usually very vibrant and knowledgeable lawmaker is living in a bubble or in denial.
This ritual which has been ongoing at the national level also happens in the same manner at the state level.
It should therefore not surprise anybody that about N3.8bn was allegedly provided for the upgrading and furnishing of the State House Clinic, Aso Rock.
Who has exclusive rights to construct and furnish such facilities in Aso Rock Villa, if not Julius Berger, a contractor?
Who supplied bulletproof BMW cars that landed Stella Oduah, a former aviation minister, in a hot water, Coscharis, a contractor?
You can figure out who is likely to supply the estimated N1bn BMW cars being proposed for use in the CVU in the Villa. Have you noticed that the brand was expressly mentioned in the budget proposal to avoid sudden change to Mercedes or Toyota after approval had been received? That’s how clever and thoroughly detailed civil servants and their contractor partners in crime can be.
Coupled with the spat that the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, reportedly had with civil servants who were supposed to travel with him to China and were flying in first class with tickets provided by a would-be Chinese contractor, it is easy to see that corruption is more endemic in the civil service than in the public service.
It’s just that while corruption is systemic in the civil service, it is sporadic in the public service as reflected in the $2.1bn arms purchase funds converted to campaign slush funds now tagged “Dasukigate”, which happened within a short period compared to the Yakubu Yesufu and Abdulrashid Maina heist which was consistently going on over the years.
Every disappointment, they say, is a blessing, implying that every dark event also has its good side, if we take time to look closely.
President Buhari now has his job cut out for him, as he must also, after dealing with the political class, focus his anti-corruption war on the civil servants-the ant in terms of population size, (five per cent) that gulps the elephant size of Nigeria’s revenue budgeted (70 per cent).
To that end, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other |Related Offences Commission needs to be revamped, so that like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, which is currently prosecuting politicians and oil/ gas barons , thieving civil servants can equally be brought to book.
While acknowledging that the Treasury Single Account and Zero-based Budgeting recently introduced to efficiently track and trap as well as allocate public funds on a verifiable project-by-project basis, are helping to stem corruption in the public service, the whistle-blowing bill currently in the National Assembly for passage into law is also a useful tool that will help reduce, if not eliminate the debilitating effect of corruption perpetrated by civil servants in Nigeria.
So, the National Assembly should hurry up the passage of the bill that will help stem the haemorrhaging of scarce financial resources and thus save lives lost daily owing to lack of medical facilities for optimum anti natal and maternal care, one of the areas where Nigeria has fallen below the minimum threshold of the Millennium Development Goals which has now been transformed into the Sustainable Development Goals, of the United Nations.
As a lot of pundits have argued, if Nigeria collects at least 50 per cent of taxes that is due to her, there may not be a need for the present hues and cries about the loss of oil revenue due to dramatic drop in international market price.
As a political science scholar, l can confirm without equivocation that the level of tax compliance in a society is a reflection of the level of adoption of a culture of democracy in the society.
In that regard, Lagos State takes the gold medal in generation of tax revenue (about N20bn monthly) owing to the innovative tax system introduced to shore up revenue when former President Olusegun Obasanjo suspended the monthly statutory allocation of funds from the federation account to the state as a sanction for creating local government development agencies beyond the provision in the Nigerian constitution.
Thus, what was meant to be punishment and therefore an affliction, became a blessing in disguise, of which the Federal Government is now adopting by hiring Tunde Fowler, the erstwhile head of tax collection in Lagos State, as the new helmsman at the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
Of course, it is also the finding of political scientists that the corollary to higher level of tax compliance in a society is that the government becomes more accountable, as taxpayers are bound to demand more transparency and accountability on what it does with the funds realised from the sweat of their brow.
As the roots of democracy deepens in Nigeria by growing from fibrous to tap roots, the days of kleptomaniac civil servants may be numbered, but President Buhari must, first of all, start by fishing out and sanctioning the perpetrators of the 2016 appropriation bill sabotage.
At least, that will serve as a warning to other potential saboteurs still in the civil service system and thus compel them to desist from the unpatriotic enterprise.
Concluded
PUNCH
END
Be the first to comment