Buhari must start his budget speech this week with an apology

This week, on Wednesday 14 December, President Buhari will present his draft budget for 2017 to the National Assembly. It will be his second since assuming office last year. But when the president gives his Budget speech on Wednesday, most Nigerians would be sceptical or even cynical about what he says. Truth is, budget failure and unfulfilled promises have taken the wind out of the president’s sails, and he will struggle to tell Nigerians “I stand before you to promise …”, as he did last year. When Buhari said those words is his 2016 Budget speech, most Nigerians gave him the benefit of the doubt, but see where that has taken them!

Remember last year’s N6 trillion budget? Well, leaving aside the shambolic process that led to the so-called “budget padding”, the truth is that hardly any of that budget’s promises has been fully kept. It was dubbed the “Budget of change”, but has brought virtually no change on the ground to transform the economy and the lives of most Nigerians. The test of any successful budget is that it delivers programme outcomes and creates tangible benefits for the people. The 2016 budget fails this test, despite the president trumpeting it as “a historic milestone for us as a nation”, and, more specifically, presenting it as the answer to Nigeria’s huge infrastructure, unemployment and poverty problems.

Last year, I wrote that the budget suffered from an optimism bias, and that it would be hamstrung by a serious delivery deficit. But the president gave the nation his word! In his Budget speech, President Buhari said “I know many people will say ‘I have heard this before’”, but went on to assure Nigerians that “Our actions will speak for us”. But what exactly have the government’s actions spoken for it since the budget? Well, they have spoken about broken budget promises on, for instance, economic reforms, infrastructure and social development, three of the budget’s so-called six pillars! Surely, when a leader gave his word and couldn’t keep it, he should apologise. This is why President Buhari should start his 2017 Budget speech with an apology to Nigerians. The Magna Carta established the principle that there should be no taxation without representation; that also means there should be no budgeting without accountability!

Budgeting is, of course, ubiquitous in democratic governments across the world, but accountability is at its core. In the UK, where the chancellor presents a budget statement to the House of Commons every March or in the US, where the president submits a draft budget to Congress eight months before the new fiscal year, budgeting is a serious and rigorous business. The Budget statement is a credible document, combed in detail by economists and other experts, and used by the media, the public and the legislators to scrutinise and hold the government accountable. Thus, in most countries, a budget is worth the paper it is written on; it does, within the bounds of reasonable adjustments, what it says on the tin!

That, sadly, is hardly the case in Nigeria where the problem of budget failure is perennial. This is not just my view; hear, for instance, what the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, said recently. Speaking to journalists about the 2017 budget, he said “the Senate is tired of having budget documents that, at the end of the day, when it comes to implementation, don’t mean anything”, noting that the problem of unexecuted budgets has become a “trend”. In a recent interview on the BBC “HardTalk” programme, Okechukwu Enelamah, the minister of industry, trade and investment, also acknowledged the problem with budget implementation in Nigeria, saying that “The time it takes for budgetary allocations to translate into physical projects takes too long”. And, not long ago, Fitch, the ratings agency, downgraded Nigeria’s growth forecast, citing, among other problems, “poor budget implementation”. The implementation challenge in Nigeria is, indeed, huge!

But budget failure doesn’t start with poor implementation; it has its roots in a flawed process, particularly the planning. And, truth be told, the 2016 budget had serious birth defects. For a start, it wasn’t presented by President Buhari until about seven months after assuming office, and not signed into law until about four months after it was passed by the National Assembly, all of which are indicative of lack of effective leadership and competent institutional actors. Although the minister of budget and national planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, published what he called “Nigeria’s Budget Implementation Plan” in May this year, it takes no rocket scientist to tell that the budget would hit the buffers.

Let’s be clear, for a government claiming to prioritise infrastructure and social development, the Buhari administration certainly lacks the credible commitment and critical urgency needed to drive serious change in these areas. For instance, nearly two years in power, this government is still muddling through on its flagship social intervention programme, where, despite the recently hyped recruitment of 200,000 graduates, its overall achievement is still far short of its manifesto and budget promises.

The challenges, though, are more systemic: Nigeria has a history of policy failure. For instance, last year, at a workshop organised by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), the organisation drew attention to the chronic and acute problem of project failure in Nigeria. According to UNIDO, “Nigeria invests millions of dollars on projects, yet experiences over 60% project failure within the framework of governmental system”.  As a practical example, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) did a special report, shortly after President Buhari assumed office, which showed that there were 11,800 abandoned federal government projects, a problem that is replicated at the state and local government levels, with several trillions of naira wasted as a result. It is anybody’s guess how many abandoned projects the Buhari government would add to the existing stock as its approach to policy or project implementation is hardly better than those of its predecessors.

Of course, at the heart of all of this malaise is government effectiveness. Last year, I ran a two-part piece in this column on “the fundamentals of policy-making” because I believe it’s profoundly important for government to be effective at making and implementing policies. As one policy expert rightly puts it, “more people are likely to lead more fulfilled lives if they live in countries with effective government”. And government effectiveness is about delivery. Good policies or good budgets are not enough, they must be implemented, to quote a British permanent secretary, “with professionalism, rigour and as much pace as is consistent with effective delivery”. Surely, any failure of delivery is a failure of governance; and when governance fails, democracy and the people suffer.

This is why the focus on government effectiveness and delivery has assumed global dimensions, thanks in part to the work and advocacy of Michael Barber, former senior adviser to Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister. Two of Barber’s books, “Deliverology” and “How to Run a Government” are widely read by policy makers around the world, and I would recommend them to Nigeria’s ministers and civil servants. Essentially, Barber’s argument is that delivery or what he calls “deliverology” requires deliberate and intentional actions, which must include the establishment of a Delivery Unit at the centre of government, the gathering of performance data for setting targets and trajectories, and the use of “routines”, including through stock takes, to ensure a focus on performance.

Of course, deliverology assumes that one is delivering on the right things, which is why having the right strategy is also important. A number of civil servants in the UK are, for instance, reading Richard Rumelt’s book, “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters” to shape the new government’s industrial strategy.  Rumelt argues that every good strategy must consist of three core elements, a diagnosis that defines a challenge, a guiding approach to dealing with the challenge, and a set of coherent actions consistent with the guiding policy. Certainly, once you’ve developed a set of coherent actions, deliverology kicks in: they have to be delivered on the ground.

But, let’s face it, policy or budget failure in Nigeria stems from more basic problems: lack of political will, lack of bureaucratic capacity and lack of scrutiny and accountability. Unless the president and his ministers have the political will to develop a good budget and ensure its successful implementation, unless the civil servants and other agents have the capacity to ensure that a budget delivers the desired outcomes on the ground, and unless the media, the public and legislators hold the government and individual ministers accountable for effective delivery, the problem of budget or policy failure in Nigeria will never cease.

So, while President Buhari should apologise for the failure of the 2016 budget, he needs a positive alignment of all the institutions and institutional actors to ensure the success of the 2017 budget. Without this, whatever he says this week, the 2017 budget may also, sadly, fail! But let’s hope we can avoid another budget failure.

Olu Fasan