The Muhammadu Buhari Presidency is alleging hideous “mutilation” of Budget 2016, just passed by the National Assembly.
That is delaying the presidential assent to the Appropriation Bill; and the frenetic economic activity, with the probable money ease, expected to follow.
The alleged “mutilations” affect key infrastructure proposals, including the coastal Calabar-Lagos standard gauge rail project. Nigeria’s N60 billion counterpart funding, a crucial component of a proposed $2 billion (N400 billion) loan from China to implement the project, was allegedly expunged from the document.
But that claim has drawn fierce legislative-executive exchanges. The National Assembly has riposted, through Abdulmumin Jibrin, House Approximation Committee chair, that the so-called Calabar-Lagos rail wasn’t originally part of the budget. Ay, admitted the executive, but it was in the amended estimates the president re-submitted.
According to a report in The Nation of Sunday of April 10, the parliament allegedly made a complete mess of estimates to complete crucial road arteries nationwide. Instead of endorsing that spending plan, it shovelled funds for new roads, such that, at the end of the day, neither the old nor the new would have been completed.
So did it make an alleged mess of the bulk of the health components of the social infrastructure the budget was designed to fund. Alleged over-provision for rural health facilities and boreholes, already provisioned for; and alleged scrapping of funds to buy drugs for major public health campaigns, like HIV/AIDS and Polio.
But again here, the National Assembly balks. The Health mix-up arose from the original padding, with the Health minister, it recalled, spectacularly disowning his ministry’s estimates.
Now, after all the see-saw, what really is happening?
Is this a case of a careless executive, pushing its fault on, and infernally scapegoating an already notorious National Assembly, which has not, for once, fired popular imagination?
Or, internal sabotage, by an anti-development (if not outright anti-people) National Assembly, wilfully abusing its powers of budgetary oversight?
Or just infantile politics by an errant ensemble, the supposed bastion of the people’s democratic dreams, hopes and aspirations, bent on turning all to a hideous nightmare?
More worrisome: the news that the Lagos-Kano modern rail project was left intact but the Calabar-Lagos project was scrapped, introduced a noxious regional politics into the whole mix.
If true, why would northern national legislators band together to pass the Lagos-Kano rail project but the southern ones, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, conspire to let go of a key infrastructure thrust, that could change the face of the South East and South-South economies for good?
For the South-South and South East representatives, could it be a case of mindless spite, the political equivalent of cutting your nose to spite your face?
For the South West ones, a case of culpable indifference that damned the politically grumpy South East and South South to stew in their perceived spite?
If that were true, wouldn’t the South-South, despite its huge oil resources, no thanks to its own lawmakers, make itself Nigeria’s political Tantalus? Tantalus (from which came the English word “tantalize”) was the Greek wretch, fated to eternally gawk at choice fruits and sparkling water, but never tasting neither!
Indeed, if South-South parliamentarians share the mentality of Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, who because of political differences with his predecessor would abandon the state’s monorail project, then they would have put the South-South in further developmental bind.
And is the South East, due to nothing but bad politics, resigned to its perennial anthem of “marginalization”, when its representatives could make a huge difference by playing the politics of development, as opposed to politics of spite?
But at the end of it all, isn’t everyone in a lose-lose situation, further deepening the intolerable mass poverty and lack of opportunities in the land?
O, could this “dummy” be why the National Assembly wanted to blind-sight the president into signing the bill without providing him with the detailed breakdown?
That the president wouldn’t give the National Assembly the benefit of the doubt — doesn’t that raise a big question about the legislature’s trust quotient?
Questions, questions, questions! But at the end of the day, the answer lies in the National Assembly leadership.
Since 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo roasted the National Assembly in the furnace of the controversial furniture allowance, the national legislature has never really recovered its image. So, should there be any controversy, not a few would rather pronounce it guilty, before it proves its innocence!
With the current 8th National Assembly, that perceived integrity gap even got worse.
To start with, the rule by which the Bukola Saraki-led leadership in the Senate emerged was a forgery. The Police already investigated and established that forgery. But somehow, the Federal Attorney-General, for curious reasons, would not press a charge, as required under the law.
Then, there are the many troubles of Senate President Saraki, all hinged on alleged lack of basic integrity in government and scant regard for public morality.
The ongoing Code of Conduct Tribunal trials and the newly brewing Panama papers scandals have cast a serious pall on the corporate integrity of the legislature — if the fish’s head is rotten, isn’t the body dead? — and its leadership’s likely temptation to fudge and block, just to have one back on the executive, allegedly orchestrating the CCT trials.
The putative motive to stall even gets starker, when the subject is political nitty-gritty. The trade-off to make Saraki senate president changed the power calculus. Rebel APC legislators banding with the PDP, which strategic interest is seeing the APC government fail, further points in the direction of plausible sabotage of the budget, to settle political scores.
Is Budget 2016, programmed to reflate the economy and give Nigerians a new lease of economic life, a victim of political war gaming? No conclusive proof. But there appears a disturbing pointer.
That is why Nigerians must rise and rally against any such negative manifestation. With the current pains in the land, this budget is too important to be left to the whims and caprices of degenerate politicians.
So, the executive and legislature must make a success — and fast — of their ongoing palaver to sort out the mess.
As for probable saboteurs, that is a grand betrayal of sacred trust. A legislator is to make laws for the good of his polity, not to play politics to inflict more pains on his electors.
That is why the electors, betrayed and hurt, must take specific notices of such errant and irresponsible behaviour; and punish hard, whoever is culpable, at the next electoral cycle.
NATION
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