When something goes awry with a project or a policy in a public or corporate sector organisation, it is always the case that, to save face, something or somebody must be blamed. That explains why Zero Based Budgeting, which is the latest policy innovation of government aimed at arresting corruption in the public sector, is the ‘fall guy’ of the 2016 budget. Indeed, ZBB has been blamed for the inconsistencies in the budget.
To douse the tension raised by the unsavoury discoveries in the proposed 2016 Appropriation Bill, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, has opted like a good lieutenant to shield President Muhammadu Buhari from the darts being thrown at him due to the unfolding budget fiasco.
With ZBB being held up as the culprit, Udoma is absolved of blame,President Buhari is protected and the civil servants are covered, but the citizens are suffering untold hardships as the budget, which calls for greater scrutiny, is now bogged down in the National Assembly much longer than the initial February deadline.
Assuming the complexity of ZBB is truly the cause of the disaster that has befallen the 2016 budget, is ZBB also responsible for the shoddy, if not shady manner, in which it was sneaked out of the NASS for amendment ostensibly by the Presidential Adviser on National Assembly, Senator Ita Enang? How about the discovery by the committee on judiciary that the provision for Investment and Securities Tribunal in the 2016 budget is exactly a replication of the 2015 document? Aside the discovery of about N10bn as fictitious provision for a strange budget head in the education ministry, the legislators have also rejected the same ministry’s budget as being completely different from what the President presented to NASS.
As if the melodrama of the NASS declaring the 2016 Appropriation Bill missing and doctored is not bad enough, a couple of ministers and a handful of heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies have also raised the alarm over strange insertions in their budgets during their defense before the lawmakers and they have, therefore, disowned them, further embarrassing the executive arm of government.
Notable amongst the vocal complainants are the Minister of Health, Isaac Oyewole and the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed.
The hullabaloo has been so much that President Buhari had to apologise to Nigerians with a promise to separate the hubris from the substance of the 2016 Appropriation Bill, with a directive that the document should be uploaded to the website of the budget and planning ministry for more public scrutiny.
Mr president’s unsavory ordeal from his first budget to his compatriots started from his maiden media chat where he was tasked by callers who exposed some of the outrageous expenditure provisions for Aso Rock villa and NASS to him.
This is coupled with the fact that late last year,the usually very vocal former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Chukwuma Soludo had weighed in with the critique that the 2016 budget proposal was not different from Goodluck Jonathan’s appropriation bill in the years past.
So it was an astonished and flustered president Buhari who was clearly unaware of some of the wasteful financial provisions that are inconsistent with the reality of the prevailing socioeconomic atmosphere in Nigeria,that ordered an immediate review and amendment of the proposed budget while in NASS’s custody.
It is against the foregoing backdrop,that one wonders if the affliction besetting 2016 appropriation bill is actually adoption of Zero Based Budgeting, ZBB,as alleged by minister Udo Udoma,or ZERO BRAINED BUDGETING, a phrase that reflects the general belief that not enough brain work was applied in producing the document, perhaps due to the short period of time it took to package it.
Besides time constraints , adorning the appropriation bill 2016 with the toga of a zero brained budget also has to do with the fact that most of the missteps that occurred in the process of producing and presenting it to NASS were avoidable. Therefore, the absence or lack of rigorous and critical thinking as well as insensitivity to the prevailing socioeconomic circumstances expected to have been invested in the process of producing such an important document, are really the culprit.
A very graphic display of the budget breakdown in the media by the budget advocacy group- Budget-It titled “Nigeria’s 2016 Budget: Wasteful And Suspicious Spending” says it all.
Clearly, a simple line-by-line analysis of the 2016 budget does not reflect the prevailing economic circumstances and the expected frugal mode that the authorities are supposed to switch the nation into.
The bottom-line is that, in addition to not being cost conscious and insensitive to the hardship being experienced by the citizenry, the crafters of the budget were profligate in allocation of scarce resources and untidy in its presentation.
Granted that they were constrained by time, in this day and age, preparing a budget with all the latest Information Technology, IT applications available, should not be as challenging as rocket science but a no-brainier. To the dismay of most Nigerians, the drafters of the document and conveyors of same to NASS, were so tacky that the budget is now so inelegant and therefore the butt of jokes on numerous mainstream and an online media platforms.
The good news now is that beyond budget minister, Udo Udoma attributing everything that went wrong with budget 2016 to ZBB, President Buhari has also ‘done the needful ‘ by firing the Director of Budget, Yahaya Gusau, for superintending over the perversion of 2016 appropriation bill . Apart from appointing a replacement, Tijani Abdulahi immediately, Ben Akabueze, a gentle man that l would like to refer to as ‘Mr Budget’ has also been hired as special adviser to the budget minister.
With the appointment of Ben Akabueze to the budget ministry, in my estimation, President Buhari hit ‘the bull’s eyes’. As long as he is involved in developing its budget, Nigeria’s appropriation blues will be consigned to the past.
Also, the President has a Chief of Staff in the person of Abba Kyari, a man gifted in financial matters, to coordinate with Akabueze.
In the absence of an economic adviser and economic management team, engaging such a body of experts to restructure the 2016 budget is a welcome development and a reflection of the fact that Buhari is listening to the voice of the masses.
We must applaud the President for introducing more brains and less brawn in governance, with regard to budgeting, so that we may leave a proud legacy for future generations.
PUNCH
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