Essentially, the National Assembly has turned the budget into a completely incoherent set of monetary allocations designed to boost the egos of legislators and swell their bank accounts. Our legislators have become completely irresponsible and they must be stopped in the national interest.
Once again, the National Assembly has re-written the budget, not to improve but to privatise it by infusing it with thousands of personal projects through which they plan to make money corruptly to enrich themselves. In so doing, they have once again debased the budget by imposing on it the logic of self-serving primitive accumulation that characterises much of their legislative actions. While signing the budget on Wednesday, the president drew attention to the following: That he submitted the 2018 Budget proposals to the National Assembly on November 7, 2017 and had hoped that the usual legislative review process would be quick, so as to move Nigeria towards a predictable January to December financial year but they sat on it for over seven months.
Even more important, the National Assembly made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration and introduced 6,403 projects of their own, amounting to N578 billion. The president argues that many of the projects cut are critical and may be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocations to them.
Last year, the National Assembly had inserted 1,170 new projects into the 2017 budget of the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing. They had increased the budget from N364.2 billion to N586.6 billion. In massacring the budget of the Ministry, they simply removed monies allocated to key national projects such as the Abuja-Lokoja dual carriageway, the Second Niger Bridge, the Mambila and Zungeru hydropower projects and the Katsina Wind Farm Energy project. They then replaced these key national projects with thousands of petty projects, mainly in their constituencies. Yes, legislators have responsibility to promote the interest of their constituencies but that cannot be done at the expense of the nation. Essentially, the National Assembly has turned the budget into a completely incoherent set of monetary allocations designed to boost the egos of legislators and swell their bank accounts. Our legislators have become completely irresponsible and they must be stopped in the national interest.
Even more serious is the fact that they are putting projects into the budget that have not been designed, surveyed and costed, and are simply meaningless figures because pet projects that have not been processed are not real projects. This process embarked upon by legislators simply turns the budget into an instrument for destroying good governance…
The legislators have been saying that they have the ultimate responsibility for finalising the budget and they are right. However, there is a process and they cannot just do what they like. The normal process in democracies is that budgets have their origins in the manifestos and programmes of the party in power. These are then processed into three-year plans designed to achieve set objectives that have been defined by the government. Based on these plans, ministries, departments and agencies then develop multi-year projects that are then processed through architectural, engineering, ecological etc. designs and surveys, as well as costing. These are then broken into annual budget estimates. When legislators disregard all the preparatory work that has been done and then insert pet projects into the budget, they are destroying the national plan of their own government.
Even more serious is the fact that they are putting projects into the budget that have not been designed, surveyed and costed, and are simply meaningless figures because pet projects that have not been processed are not real projects. This process embarked upon by legislators simply turns the budget into an instrument for destroying good governance because monies are allocated to “non-projects.” It is in this context that some legislators go behind and collect monies they have inserted for what everyone knows are non-projects. The executive must resist this type of legislative rascality but citizens must also learn to reject the reduction of the budgeting process to ego trips for legislators.
Returning to the 2018 budget, the legislators have once again messed up the provisions for the same nationally/regionally strategic infrastructure projects such as the counterpart funding for the Mambila Power Plant, the Second Niger Bridge/ancillary roads, the East-West Road, Bonny-Bodo Road, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and Itakpe-Ajaokuta Rail Project by cutting an aggregate of N11.5 billion from the allocations for these. Similarly, provisions for some ongoing critical infrastructure projects in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, especially major arterial roads and the mass transit rail project, were cut by a total of N7.5 billion. The provision for rehabilitation and additional security measures for the United Nations building in Abuja was cut by N3.9 billion from N4 billion to N100 million; this will make it impossible for the Federal Government of Nigeria to fulfil its commitment to the United Nations on this project. As if these are not enough, the provisions for various strategic interventions in the health sector, such as the upgrade of some tertiary health institutions, transport and storage of vaccines through the cold chain supply system, provision of anti-retroviral drugs for persons on treatment, establishment of chemotherapy centres and procurement of dialysis consumables were cut by an aggregate amount of N7.45 billion. Even the safe-schools initiative suffered as the provision for security infrastructure in the 104 Unity Schools across the country were cut by N3 billion at a time when securing our students against acts of terrorism and/or kidnapping ought to be a major concern of government. Many more examples were cited by the president.
The South East Caucus of the Senate has come out to say that the original allocation for the Enugu Airport was agreed to by both the Senate and House of Representatives… This means that in law, the budget presented was not the one agreed to by the National Assembly and is therefore the product of criminal tampering with.
All these projects were replaced once again by personal pet projects. Virtually every legislator added pet projects to build roads in their constituencies. It is madness to build roads in your village that are not in any way linked to the national grid because it means you are not improving transport infrastructure but simply engaged in ego trips that do nothing to improve the movement of goods and services. It is shameful that the National Assembly increased its own budget by N14.5 billion – from N125 billion to N139.5 billion. Clearly, their concern was to increase their elections war chest budgets rather than the development of the country. In spite of all these anomalies, the president signed because in essence, the National Assembly has established its “right” to mess up the budget as they please. I believe that the president was wrong to sign the budget into the latest Appropriation Act. He should have challenged and exposed the legislators and insisted that they behave themselves in carrying out their functions.
The South East Caucus of the Senate has come out to say that the original allocation for the Enugu Airport was agreed to by both the Senate and House of Representatives. That the National Assembly allocated N2 billion for this project but this figure was subsequently reduced by someone to N500 million. This means that in law, the budget presented was not the one agreed to by the National Assembly and is therefore the product of criminal tampering with. The budget should therefore be the subject of criminal investigation to find out who changed what. The trend of irresponsible behaviour by the National Assembly must be checked if we are to improve the quality of governance in our country. Budgets are not for the whims and caprices of individual legislators but are part of the process of governmental planning and preparation. The allocations to pet projects are not proper budget subheads, and through the regimes of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan and now Buhari, legislators have transformed budgets into objects that serve two purposes – first, to inflate their egos and secure electability for them through the insertion of budget lines for pet projects, which are essentially corrupt acts to make them richer. Governments and civil society must mobilise to stop this legislative rascality that is becoming the norm in our society.
A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.
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