2016 Budget and matters arising

President Muhammadu Buhari presented the N6.08 trillion 2016 budget estimate on December 22, 2016, naming it “the budget of change.” But recent events and controversies bothering on alleged errors, padding, distortions and unauthorized additions to the document may have put the relevant departments, agencies and individuals such as Budget office, directors general, among others under scrutiny.

While some of the public concerns about suspicious and fraudulent allocations are valid, the explanation from the Budget and National planning office alluding challenges of the Zero Based budgeting experiment as not convincing enough.

This is because, the approach should have accommodated the objectives for which the allocations are made and not the other way round, whereby discrepancies are observed during defence of the budget proposals by the various ministries.

More intriguing is the case of Isaac Adewole, minister of health, publicly disowning the Ministry’s budget as presented to the National Assembly. Adewole shocked members of the Senate Committee on Health when he revealed during the budget defence that the original estimate of his ministry had been largely distorted as strange figures were smuggled into the budget.

He urged the committee to discard the budget proposal before it and await a new estimate to be re-submitted which would reflect the programmes of the health sector for the year.

The same story has been the lot of many ministries, so much so that Nigerians are commending the National Assembly for the oversight functions and being diligent in scrutinising the proposals.

There is no doubt that there are some senior civil servants that are responsible for the making of the budget and as such government should be courageous enough to dig into this national embarrassment. Apart from the bureaucratic apparatus, how about the budget offices in the various MDAs and ministry of finance that is supposed to coordinate activities of the other ministries?

This is why we support recent establishment of the efficiency unit of the Federal Ministry of Finance with the responsibility of re-prioritising spending and cutting cost on recurrent expenditure through detailed price guidelines to ensure value for money in procurement by MDAs.

Government should ensure that all concerns about the budget should be thoroughly investigated and perpetrators must be punished. The development may be seen as a prelude to the usual delays that have seen budgets in the past not ready until the middle of the year.

Already the February 25, earlier scheduled deadline for its passage by the National Assembly has been postponed indefinitely. Danjuma Goje and Abdulmunin Jibrin, chairmen of the joint Committees on Appropriations blamed the unrealistic passage to discrepancies and errors inherent in the proposals.

According to them, “We designed a timetable for the consideration and passage of the budget, and by that particular timetable we will pass the budget on February 25, 2016. But as you are all aware, a lot of issues have come up, and gladly so even, the executive arm of government has also come out to accept the fact that there has been a lot of errors in the budget.

The continued: “Again, during the budget defence, a lot of issues, based on the padding of the budget arising from over bloated overhead, and in some instances, cases of over bloated personnel cost. But generally, there has been a lot of issues. The Appropriation Committees would look at these issues, after the whole budget defence to do a very thorough work aimed at doing a proper clean up of the budget. “We will liaise with all the stakeholders to enable us pass the budget that is implementable; a budget that is good from the perspective of the legislature and also acceptable to the executive arm of the government. “So, in summary, the timetable for the passage of the budget is no longer realistic because the appropriation committees of both chambers of the National Assembly will need additional time to be able to do a thorough job on the 2016 Budget,” he said.  “We want to remove all ambiguities. We want to remove all paddings. We want to produce a budget that is in line with the constitutional requirement.”

“Again, in terms of capital expenditure, there are complaints coming from different quarters, arising from the imbalance from the capital allocation, and of course disagreement among the ministers and the civil servants in the various ministries that we have witnessed during the period of Budget defence.” These, all together, form enough bases for us to sit down and ensure that a thorough job is done before the Budget is passed.”

The government needs to go back to the drawing board and ensure that a realistic and workable budget is produced, that will bring the much desired change. The time to act is NOW.