Eze Onyekpere
The National Assembly on March 17, 2016
told Nigerians that they had approved the 2016 federal Appropriation
Bill and the accompanying estimates. Accordingly, the bill was forwarded
to President Muhammadu Buhari for his assent so that the bill could
become law. Thereafter, the expectation was that funds would be released
and expended on key national challenges as expected in a country
governed by laws.
However, the latest information is that
the overall estimates, aggregates and sectoral allocations were passed
whilst the National Assembly continued working on the details. Thus, the
President has no details of the approved budget. A couple of issues
arise from this development. What is the meaning of the statement that
the National Assembly has passed or approved the 2016 Appropriation
Bill? When is a bill passed or approved? Is it possible for the
Appropriation Bill to be approved by the National Assembly without the
details? It is a misnomer to state that the Appropriation Bill has been
passed or approved when the details are not ready. Essentially, what the
legislature did was to remove public attention from itself in a bid to
stop Nigerians from complaining about the delayed budget and allocating a
part of the blame to them. The President may therefore have been right
in insisting on seeing the details before signing the bill into law.
However, the President’s statement that
part of the scrutiny to be extended to the bill before he appends his
signature is to send the budget back to the Ministries, Departments and
Agencies to scrutinise on a sectoral basis to ensure that the executive
spending plan has not been distorted calls for caution. As of Sunday,
April 3, 2016, the bill had not been sent back to the President with the
details. Let us imagine some different scenarios. Imagine the bill is
sent back to the President by the National Assembly in the middle of
April and he causes it to be circulated to all the MDAs and they
eventually get back to him two weeks later, it will be the end of April.
Imagine also the scenario where the President disagrees with some
provisions rolling out of the National Assembly, we will have a scenario
where there is no guarantee of a signed budget by May. There are so
many scenarios as one can imagine but the bottom line is that we have
lost the first quarter and may lose a good part of the second quarter of
2016 if we continue on this trajectory.
What are the implications of the
foregoing scenarios? The first is that the executive and the legislature
have lost respect for laws and propriety. The President started the
process by presenting the budget very late in the year by December 22,
2015. He continued with withdrawals and substitutions and clear
evidences of budget padding from the executive angle. The legislature on
its part took their normal Christmas and New Year holidays and the
Easter holidays. Yes, the work of approving budget takes time and
meticulousness so that a well-crafted budget can be the final product.
It however does not take forever. Three months is sufficient time to
approve a budget in the legislature. But it now appears the legislature
is not in a hurry to get the budget out. With so many members and an
array of consultants and civil service bureaucracy in support, the
budget should no longer be viewed as an esoteric process. It is a
process that has been demystified so many years ago and should be
amenable to easy and quick passage.
The second implication is that we are
laying a firm foundation and endless apologies for the failure of the
2016 federal budget. Complaints about time constraints, natural weather
occurrences, among others have already been provided by the delays. The
Financial Year Act defines the Nigerian financial year as the period
between January 1 and December 31 of every given year. The law has been
there for decades and no one takes it seriously. We are busy attending
to the 2016 budget at a time the preparations for 2017 should have been
in top gear. When 2017 comes, we do not need a prophet to project that
we will still be late in preparing and approving the budget with the way
we have handled 2016. The Minister for Budget and National Planning,
Udoma Udo-Udoma, may be stuck on the logistics of getting the 2016
budget off the ground at a time he should be concentrating on
preparations for 2017.
The third implication from the foregoing
is that we have laid the foundation for the late presentation and
approval of the 2017 federal budget. By the Fiscal Responsibility Act,
preparations for the Medium Term Expenditure Framework 2017-2019 should
have been in top gear to get it ready, considered and endorsed by the
Executive Council of the Federation before the end of the second quarter
in June. But, who is working on it? Maybe, there are officials working
on it secretly without the necessary consultations and public engagement
which is against the law and public policy.
The dimension of the grandstanding by
President Buhari in announcing the details of how he will subject the
approved budget to the MDA scrutiny in the international media in the
United States of America calls for sober reflection. What is the gain in
announcing such to the media in the US and for the attention of
countries who normally do the right things in their budgeting process?
Would anyone between late March and early April clap for a country whose
financial year started in January but without a budget by the end of
the first quarter? We need to get our acts together within the borders
of our nation and stop this idea of behaving like kids who will
perpetually report their misdeeds to their parents or schoolteachers.
For so many years, the Centre for Social
Justice, the Fiscal Responsibility Commission and so many agencies have
been calling for respect to budgeting laws and frameworks and no one
seems to be listening. A man is expected to anticipate and expect the
natural consequences of his act but not in Nigeria. We intend to start
the budgeting process late and finish early. The laws are not for us. We
conduct the same experiment 20 times without altering the external and
internal variables and expect different results. This is not the way to
run budgetary and fiscal governance. We need to change the way we
prepare, approve, implement, monitor, evaluate and audit the budget. If
we fail to do so, we will continue the trajectory of underdevelopment in
perpetuity.
No comments:
Post a Comment