Some top civil servants believed to have mounted bureaucratic resistance to proposals reflecting financial prudence and frugality by the new administration during the preparation of the 2016 budget currently before the National Assembly may be shown the way out of the service, THISDAY has gathered.
Government sources conversant with the budgeting process disclosed to THISDAY at the weekend that as soon as speculations became rife that the presidency was considering a budget in the region of about N8 trillion in order to significantly increase capital expenditure, bureaucrats came up with a proposal of about N9.7 trillion for recurrent and capital spending.
A N6.08 trillion budget for the fiscal year 2016 was however presented to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari last December after initial figures proposed by bureaucrats in the civil service had been slashed.
Government sources said many of the controversial provisions in the budget were smuggled-in by what was described as “the budget mafia” in the civil service, “who consider the period of budgeting as their time of massive opportunity to arrange the stealing of public funds.”
Sources said the inclusion of many of the provisions that had drawn the ire of the public managed to sail through the budget that has over 6000 items because supervision was made even more difficult with the uncooperative attitude of the senior bureaucrats and their subordinates who were themselves expected to be involved in the supervisory process.
It was gathered that the resistance by the budget mafia in the civil service started with the adoption of the zero-based Budgeting as against the usual envelope and incremental system used in the past by the federal government.
The zero-based budgeting involves justifying needs and costs as against the yearly incremental approach that transfers expenses from previous budgets with added upward reviews. The old system having been mastered by bureaucrats and past public officials engenders corruption.
Although the presidency had been planning on the adoption of the zero-based budget with top officials from the then Budget Office and then National Planning Commission few months after taking over power, yet when both agencies were merged into the new Ministry of Budget and National Planning and a minister, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, was assigned to the ministry, the civil servants simply refused to properly brief him on the zero-based budget and efforts already made.
For weeks after the minister was sworn in, the bureaucrats were said to have continued to plan on the old budget model, thereby stalling the decision to use the zero-based budget until the new minister found out from the presidency. The budget mafia had projected that the presidency would be forced to abandon the zero-based budget due to time constraint.
However the presidency regrouped the budget planning efforts around the concept of Zero-Based Budget by early December when the Budget Minister now aware of the zero-Based Budget took control and leadership of the process. Even at that some of the bureaucrats did not cooperate taking longer than required time to come back with revisions to their estimates that were recommended and ratified by the presidency. In the process many of the provisions already marked for revision found their way into the document.
It was gatherrred that the arrow-heads of this resistance would have been sacked wise counsel that such action may further stall the budgeting process prevailed.
It was also gathered that even the process of costing some of the expenditures was also bedeviled by bureaucratic bottlenecks as the agency of government responsible for maintaining a price reference list, the Bureau of Public Procurement, provided a list prepared in 2013 instead of an updated list. Price reference list ought to be updated quarterly.
“We were virtually doing vigils to beat the time since the budget had to be presented before the end of the year to the National Assembly, and while some of the civil servants eventually cooperated, those who were resistant caused the insertions of many of the provisions that are now embarrassing the government.
“People were so bent on exploiting the system that the time was simply not sufficient to stop them, but since the budget is only an estimate, the implementation part now offers the presidency the opportunity to tame the corrupt intentions and practices,” the source said.
Another source involved in the budget process also attributed some of the duplications noticed in the budget to the difficulties experienced by the software that had been in use for planning the budget in the past, which failed to “easily accommodate the zero-based budget templates.”
“While the President have stood for prudence and against waste, those controversial provisions clearly don’t represent these presidential standards,” the source said.
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