By Tunde Bamise
It is budget season again for Nigeria. In November, President Bola Tinubu assented to the 2023 Supplementary Budget, and, a few weeks later, presented the 2024 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly. Naturally, this has been followed by a lot of debate and conversation about the details of the budget.
President Tinubu, in his presentation speech to the National Assembly, described it as “Our Budget of Renewed Hope; a budget which will go further than ever before in cementing macro-economic stability, reducing the deficit, increasing capital spending and allocation to reflect the eight priority areas of this Administration.”
With an aggregate expenditure of N27.5 trillion, it is fairly impressive, with about 30 per cent of this devoted to capital expenditure. However, the Renewed Hope ambition of this budget will be muted or of no effect if the budget is not implemented in a credible and efficient manner. One of the biggest ongoing challenges being faced in Federal budgeting in Nigeria is the issue of “padding”, where various line items are allegedly inserted into the budgets of agencies which should ordinarily have no business with those projects.
In his speech at the signing ceremony for the 2022 Appropriation Speech, President Muhammadu Buhari had cause to complain about some “worrisome changes” that were made to the proposal originally submitted by the Executive. Among other things the then President lamented that “Provisions made for as many as 10,733 projects were reduced while 6,576 new projects were introduced into the budget by the National Assembly.” This is truly alarming, to realise that the National Assembly can unilaterally include more than 6,000 projects into a Federal Budget, without consultation with the President whose signature turns the Bill into an Act.
It is necessary to quote the former President in some detail, to drive home the magnitude of the problem: “Most of the projects inserted relate to matters that are basically the responsibilities of state and local governments, and do not appear to have been properly conceptualised, designed and costed. Many more projects have been added to the budgets of some MDAs with no consideration for the institutional capacity to execute the additional projects and/or for the incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required.”
The same
pattern played out in the 2023 Appropriation Bill as returned to the President
by the 9th National Assembly. Again, Buhari raised the alarm: “I have also
noted that the National Assembly introduced new projects into the 2023 budget
proposal for which it has appropriated N770.72 billion.” But there is no
evidence that anything was done to address this. Just as there is no proof that
anything will change in this 2024 Appropriation Bill cycle. Going by the
already established pattern, Nigerians should expect that the National Assembly
will again toe the path of introducing hundreds if not thousands of new
projects into the Bill, and also move things around without regard for the
“institutional capacity to execute the additional projects and/or for the
incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required.”
Nigerians need to pay greater scrutiny to these issues. Insanity,
it is said, is repeating the same things while expecting different results. It
is imperative that the National Assembly reject any budgetary items that are
out of place. During the 2023 Budget Defence, the Senate questioned and
rejected the insertion of N11 billion worth of contracts in the Ministry of
Defence Budget, including N2.25 billion for Safe School Initiatives that should
have been in the budget of the Ministry of Education.
Sometimes these insertions are done
by legislators themselves. I have heard from reliable NASS sources that it has
become a habit for some legislators to include constituency projects like roads
and water projects in the budgets of agencies and parastatals whose mandate has
nothing to do with such. In 2022, BudgIT, a civil society organisation found
that that 64 per cent of the budget of the National Agency for the Great Green
Wall (NAGGW) was allocated to the procurement of street-lights, motorcycles and
other contracts with no relevance or connection to the mandate of the Agency.
The River Basin Development Authorities have also been reported to face these
challenges. Similarly, it has been reported that the services of the Nigerian
Armed Forces also suffer heavily from these insertions – there are reports of
the budgets of the Army, Navy and Air Force being padded year after year with
constituency projects by some legislators.
For example, the 2022 and 2023 Budgets of one of
the Armed Services are said to contain several inserted constituency road
projects in Plateau State, amounting to billions of Naira. This is a state
where the Nigerian military has significant existing security responsibilities
– so why are they being forced to pay for road construction contracts that
should be taken care of by Federal and State Ministries of Works?
I recall that, recently, a former spokesperson of
the Nigerian Air Force, Group Captain Sadeeq Shehu (rtd), speaking on Arise TV, disclosed that the Nigerian
military typically does not even receive all of its legitimately allocated
annual budgets in the first place, because of recurring constraints with
funding the budget. At a time when Nigeria is facing multiple security
challenges that require determined investment, it is therefore, most unwise and
unfair to divert these already limited military resources to projects
completely unrelated to their primary responsibility.
Not only does the military have no business doing
constituency project contracts for legislators, this practice also ends up
reducing what is available for them to spend on the critical task of securing
Nigeria and catering to the welfare of personnel. It is my hope that the 2024
budget will be speedily considered and passed for presidential assent by the
National Assembly, to enable its benefits kick into action in a timely manner.
But most importantly, it must be given an unprecedented level of scrutiny, to
ensure that the dysfunctions of previous budgets are not allowed to replicate
themselves in this much-awaited Budget of Renewed Hope.
*Bamise is a commentator on public issues
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