It is time for new thinking on the best way to address our budget challenges as a country. What we have now is not working. The management/ monitoring of public sector budgets in Nigeria is too centralised and unwieldy. The control and management of budgets should be decentralised and responsibility devolved to business units.
As the National Assembly deliberates on the 2018 budget proposals, we are faced once again with this annual ritual that has made little or no impact on the lives of the masses of Nigerians. We go through this farcical ceremony every year, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome. We agree on a budget we know from day one cannot be delivered because of poor budget estimates and unrealistic assumptions of income and expenditure and expect to have roads and other vital infrastructure. We repeat this same failed process every year, sadly, at the expense of over 100 million Nigerians languishing in poverty on less than $2 a day.
Nigeria’s budget process has largely failed to deliver the desired improvement in public services and infrastructure development due to poor planning, corruption and the lack of will on the part of successive governments to honour contractual commitments. Projects are approved with no definite source of funding or robust plan on how the projects would be delivered over the life of the project. The thousands of trucks, stretching miles on end, literally parked on roads and bridges leading up to the Apapa port, is a glaring shame to a budget process that has failed.
Wherever you look, the story is the same. Our education system has virtually collapsed due to underfunding. Increasing numbers of parents are now choosing to educate their children outside Nigeria because of the lack of confidence in our education system. It is estimated that Nigerian parents spend over $2 billion a year in school fees in foreign educational institutions, more than the federal budget for education. This capital flight is funding the education infrastructure of other countries, creating jobs for their citizens, whilst our public educational institutions lie in ruins. It is perhaps only in Nigeria that the entire leadership of the country, including the president, ministers, state governors, legislators and senior civil servants educate their children abroad as a matter of course. Our leaders simply have no shame. This would be unimaginable in any other democracy, but is only possible in Nigeria because of a docile electorate that seem unable to hold their leaders accountable.
Making the budget deliver the desired outcomes for the people would require a complete roots and branch change in the current budgeting process. It would require leadership and courage; the kind of courage that was demonstrated by Governor El Rufai in facing up to the failing education system and budget challenges in his state. The president must take the bull by the horn.
The situation in the health sector is even more dire. The country is facing what can only be described as a crisis in the health sector because of the acute lack of funding. Patients have to pay for everything, from operating gloves to diesel for generators. Hospitals have become mere shells where people come to die. As usual, the poor have borne the brunt of Nigeria’s failing infrastructure. If you have a heart attack, or any serious illness like cancer in Nigeria today, the chances of survival for 95 percent of the population is bleak. Thousands of people are dying needlessly every day in hospitals because of the lack of drugs and basic medical equipment. The latest World Health Organisation survey of life expectancy places Nigeria in the bottom 10 countries with the least average life expectancy in the world – ranked a lowly 194 of the 200 countries surveyed. Whilst life expectancy has increased to over 70 years for most countries, life expectancy in Nigeria is just 54.7 years. Even war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya have a higher average life expectancy than Nigeria.
Making the budget deliver the desired outcomes for the people would require a complete roots and branch change in the current budgeting process. It would require leadership and courage; the kind of courage that was demonstrated by Governor El Rufai in facing up to the failing education system and budget challenges in his state. The president must take the bull by the horn. It is no use complaining to Nigerians about revenue generating agencies not remitting what they should to government coffers. Nigerians are rightly asking why the people running these agencies are still in their posts and not under investigation. The president has the carrot and the stick. He must use them for the benefit of those young Nigerians being auctioned in Libya as merchandise and the thousands more that have perished at sea attempting the perilous journey to Europe; escaping a life of poverty and hopelessness at home for a life of servitude in Europe. Revenue generating agencies should not be holding the country to ransom and using monies due to Nigerians to pay themselves outrageous salaries and allowances.
The 2018 budget presents both states and the federal government yet another opportunity to address the perennial problem of waste and corruption in the system. A senior adviser to the Kogi State governor, in a recent interview, gave the example of a local government in his state with five functioning vehicles and 82 drivers on the payroll! This would be a scandal anywhere in the world, but not in Nigeria; and we wonder why our hospitals are bare and our schools have no books? This kind of waste is replicated across the entire public sector/civil service, where thousands of people are on payrolls but have no real jobs. Many simply stay at home or come to work when they like or show up when perhaps there is some training abroad so they can claim the estacodeattached to this. The unproductivity and waste in the public sector is staggering. The government should not be borrowing to fund this waste when these funds could be used for vital infrastructure to create real jobs.
The budget process lacks the critical scrutiny Nigerians were expecting from an administration that was voted in on the mantra of change. The idea that recent budgets have been based on a zero budgeting methodology is a complete fallacy. Ministers appear to have been hoodwinked by civil servants into believing that they were proposing a zero-based budget…
It is outrageous that Nigeria has over 800 parastatals. Many of these agencies add zero value to the country and have become conduits for laundering money. The government can reduce their numbers by at least a half with very generous redundancy packages offered to laid-off staff to enable them invest in private businesses of their own and create jobs. The redundancy costs would easily be recovered from future savings in salaries and overhead expenses.
The budget process lacks the critical scrutiny Nigerians were expecting from an administration that was voted in on the mantra of change. The idea that recent budgets have been based on a zero budgeting methodology is a complete fallacy. Ministers appear to have been hoodwinked by civil servants into believing that they were proposing a zero-based budget, when the process is more like a ‘cut and paste’ exercise.
It is time for new thinking on the best way to address our budget challenges as a country. What we have now is not working. The management/ monitoring of public sector budgets in Nigeria is too centralised and unwieldy. The control and management of budgets should be decentralised and responsibility devolved to business units. There is need for a review of the way budget estimates are currently done; the way projects are profiled and funding allocated and disbursed; the way budgets are monitored and implemented; and the way budgets are reported. This would help decision making and public scrutiny. I dare say this review is not a job for arm chair professors or World Bank theorists. The government may need to look outside Nigeria for seasoned public sector budget practitioners. We must change the way we budget in Nigeria. The current system is not delivering the desired outcome.
Emmanuel Nwachukwu is a UK-based business consultant. Email: Emmanuel@pssolutions-ltd.com.
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