By Magnus Onyibe
To save face, it is the case that something or somebody must be
blamed whenever something goes awry with a project or policy in a public or
corporate sector organization. That explains why,
Zero Based Budgeting, ZBB, which is the latest policy innovation of government
aimed at arresting corruption in the public sector, is the ‘fall guy’ of budget
2016, as it were.
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| *President Buhari presents the 2016 Appropriation to the National Assembly |
To douse the tension
raised by the unsavory discoveries in the proposed 2016 appropriation bill, the
Budget and National planning minister, Udoma Udo Udoma, has opted like a good
lieutenant to shield President Muhammadu Buhari from the darts being thrown at
him as a result of the unfolding budget fiasco.
With ZBB being held
up as the culprit, Minister Udoma is absolved from 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 at the National Assembly, NASS, much longer than the initial February
deadline.
Legislators who are
reneging on their earlier pledge of speedy passage of the 2016 appropriation
bill before the end of February are justified in their decision. This is
because the chaff has to be sieved from the seed of the highly bastardized
budget to allow the long suffering Nigerian masses enjoy optimum benefits of
the resources of the country whose potentials have remained in pendency.
Assuming the
complexity of ZBB truly is the cause of the disaster that has befallen budget
2016, is ZBB also responsible for the shoddy, if not shady manner in which the
budget was sneaked out of 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, IST, in the 2016 budget is exactly a replication of the 2015
document? Is what happened to the IST budget not evidence of the continuity of
the erstwhile envelope pushing budget system said to have been replaced in the
2016 budget with ZBB which compels creating a budget from ground zero?
Aside the discovery
of about N10bn as fictitious provision for a strange budget head in Education
Ministry, legislators have also rejected the same ministry’s budget as being
completely different from what Mr President presented to the parliament.
