If the number of challenges which the 2016 budget has encountered is anything to go by, the document would go down in history as a special budget. To start with, it is the first budget of change by President Buhari’s government. In which case, it ought to depart from the “rub my back and I will concur” posture of the past. Surprisingly, change didn’t quite occur along that line as efforts were made from the beginning to adulterate the budget.
First, after a colourful presentation ceremony by the President to the National Assembly, the budget was suddenly declared missing by one and not both houses of the legislature. That took awhile to resolve because the budget was not hidden or misplaced; it was instead conjured by our many ghosts for editing. That looks incredible, isn’t it? Well, a compatriot in Diaspora reacting to my last week’s article on Nigeria’s many ghosts accused me of writing mystical things.
I quite appreciated his position because as a citizen who has been away from home for long, he didn’t know that we now live among ghosts in Nigeria. It is in our country alone, that a minister reportedly hands over several ghosts to law enforcement agents for prosecution. Being ghosts, they obviously don’t get convicted as they are arrested by another minister a few years later. Anyway, whether it is the alleged missing budget or a copy of it or indeed a brand new edition, our 2016 budget was eventually debated and passed by the national Assembly. Thereafter, getting the President to sign the document into law was no less dramatic as certain fundamentals had been replaced by what is known as constituency projects. Probably realizing that the National Assembly was not credible enough to enforce a veto, Buhari refused to sign the budget.
His decision to later sign no doubt means that the document was in the long run purified. We earnestly hope that the budget does not contain what prolific writer, Segun Adeniyi calls “several questionable purchases, curious consultancy services, seeming duplication of sub-heads, votes for projects already completed etc.” If so, how come implementation is yet to begin in earnest? In what looks like an answer to this question, our minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udo Udoma said the federal government’s knack for due process was responsible for the delay in releasing the N350 billion for infrastructure to reflate the economy and get contractors back to site. Briefing State House correspondents after last Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, Udoma, said government had mandated the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to fast-track the processes for capital budgets deployment so that the economy could be quickly reflated. This is where our worry arises. Does government need to tell MDAs to fast track a process of budget implementation? If so, should the telling be done in the 6th month of the year?
One would have expected that as soon as the budget became a reality all bodies included in it would take steps to put their organizations in readiness for disbursements of funds for the take-off of approved projects. If the MDAs had done that, government would obviously not have needed to wake them up. It would have been clear that what everyone is waiting for is the release of the funds which the nation was told long ago would be released immediately after the budget was passed. It would almost amount to criminal neglect if any government body was waiting to undertake preliminary issues after the release of funds.
On the other hand, it would be most unfair if the call on MDAs to fast track whatever process was merely a bureaucratic gimmick. This is possible because in Nigeria, due process is a strategy by which governance is slowed down in the guise of doing things right by actors who because of lack of discretion and initiative operate as slaves to rules. If therefore Nigerians are to benefit from the 2016 budget, ample care must be taken to ensure that institutional actors appreciate the fine difference between means and goals otherwise while striving to follow the several layers to be passed through to achieve a goal, the objectives and targets of the goal are not over taken by events.
We must be prepared to do away with the dysfunctional due process system which in the past was more or less a subject of manipulation where favoured vendors always won the bid because they were owned by top public officers who often allowed them to present several applications with different names. There is also the issue of the stages of remittances. A personal experience illuminates this point.
As NTA’s Chief Executive, there were government officials in my time that had a mandate to remit to MDAs, a fraction of the approved budget at each stage. All efforts to convince them that such an arrangement was extraneous in the case of our transmitter failed; instead, they dutifully released bits and pieces of our budget. At a point, one of the officials even said he wanted to inspect what we had done with the amount released before new releases as if a transmitter can be procured in stages. Hopefully that may not happen now as it did in our days of ‘envelope budgeting’ where ministries diverted monies meant for some Parastatals. One would also hope that bearing in mind the amount of time lost in getting a budget, MDAs would not be required to refund unspent monies by November which in essence could not be spent because it was remitted almost on the eve of the expiry date of expenditure. While the nation ought to appreciate the merits of due process, government should remember that due process is not the goal of governance. For too long Nigerians had hoped in vain for an improvement in their living standards. A government of change which the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) professes to be should endeavour to meet the desires of the people and not to enumerate several reasons including government’s acclaimed “knack” for due process as factors which hindered the attainment of the goals of the 2016 budget.
VANGUARD
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