2016 budget: Errors galore

Posted by admin Budget, Latest Politics Saturday, February 13th, 2016

By Omoniyi Salaudeen

THE much awaited 2016 appropriation bill before the National Assembly may take a little longer than expected to be passed into law in view of the latest development arising from the debate of the document by the lawmakers. This time around, the issue is about the discrepancies in the figures contained in the draft bill. On Wednesday, the two arms of the National Assembly declared that they needed more time to do a thorough job on the document to correct the errors so far discovered.

At a press conference jointly addressed by the Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriation, Senator Danjuma Goje, and his House of Representatives counterpart, Jibrin Abdulmumin, the lawmakers disclosed that the budget was fraught with too many errors, which had made its passage into law impossible.

Senator Goje said: “We are here in connection with the ongoing processing of the 2016 Budget because these two committees are the ones saddled with the production of the final copies of the budget that would be passed by the National Assembly for onward submission to Mr President for his assent and subsequent implementation.”

“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 provision. During the budget defence, a lot of issues based on the padding of the budget, arising from over-bloated overheads and in some instances cases of over-bloated personnel cost. The appropriation committee would look at these issues after the whole budget defence and do a very thorough work aimed at doing a proper clean-up of the budget.”

“So in summary, the time-table for passage of the budget is no longer realistic because as appropriation committees of both chambers of the National Assembly, we need additional time to do a thorough job for the 2016 budget.”

The latest development is coming barely a few weeks after the dusts raised by the controversy generated by the alleged submission of different versions of the proposed appropriation bill by the executive and its subsequent amendment had settled. While the presidency has admitted responsibility for the errors, it blamed top civil servants for smuggling frivolous allocations into the budget.

This is the first time the Federal Government is introducing a new concept of zero-based budgeting system which requires Ministries, Departments and Agencies to justify all expenses captured in the budget as against the old pattern which assigns maximum amount of capital and recurrent needs for the fiscal year to each department.

The Ministry of Budget and National Planning, whose responsibility it is to formulate the budget, however, described the defects in the document as part of the learning process. Director of Information in the ministry, Mr. Charles Dafe, said: “The members of staff in the Ministry of Budget and National Planning as well as those handling budget issues in all ministries and extra-ministerial agencies are grappling to master the technicalities in the ZBB template. As such, some errors are not unexpected in the changeover to the new ZBB approach. This was the reason the ministry arranged for the proposals to be placed on the website of the Ministry of Budget and National Planning to expose them to public scrutiny.”

Many stakeholders who spoke with Sunday Sun criticized the administration for the embarrassment it has caused to the country. A presidential candidate of the United Progressive Party (UPP) in the March 2015 general elections, Chief Checkwas Okorie, expressing concern over the issue, said the ministers who supervised the formulation of the budget were not thorough enough in their supervision. His words: “The Presidency said the civil servants should be held responsible for the mix up, including the padding of figures. But all the same, the bulk stops on his table. If the ministers who are supervising these civil servants were thorough enough to go through the figures before presenting it to the National Assembly, this would not have happened. It is a big embarrassment to the country.”

He urged the National Assembly to meticulously scrutinize the document to ensure that no hole is left in the approved appropriation bill. “I commend the National Assembly for its eagle eye to quickly identify the discrepancies. My advice is that they should not be vindictive about it. Some people out there believe the National Assembly is trying to give it back to the executive because of the travails of the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki. I hope that is not the case. But if they are just doing their job, and they are as meticulous as they are, they should be commended for that,” he added.

While admitting the errors as part of the learning process, Okorie advised the Buhari administration not to allow a repeat of the present experience. “It is all part of the learning process because this government is new. The presidency should ensure that this will be the last time that this type of embarrassing situation occurs. If the mischievous part can be traced to the civil servants, they should be properly sanctioned and the public should know about it so that others can learn,” he further posited.

The Second Republic governor of the old Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, on his own part, insisted that there was no realistic budget before the National Assembly. He said: “As far as I am concerned, there is no realistic budget before the National Assembly.

The time lag between when the budget was recovered and corrected and now is too short for a good work to be done to have a realistic budget. Before the government can think of withdrawing the budget and represented it, it must have realized that there was something fundamentally wrong about it. I do not see how proper correction could be made within this short period of time. So, for me, there is no realistic budget before the National Assembly. There are too many contradictions in the versions before the National Assembly.”

Even though the Ministry of Budget and National Planning claimed that the draft appropriation budget is available on its website for Nigerians to scrutinize, Balarabe said “The President has not taken the nation into confidence with regards to what he discovered which called for the recall of the budget.”

He dismissed the argument by the presidency blaming the civil servant for the irregularities that characterized the budget, saying “It is not impossible that those who prepared the budget betrayed the president. I do not think that the civil service can be held responsible for the defects in the budget because the civil serve is under the control of the political leadership. Whatever the civil servants have prepared has to be scrutinized and approved by the political leadership. I don’t think it is proper to blame the civil servants.”

In spite of the obvious lapses discovered with the document, Balarabe cautioned the National Assembly against rewriting the budget, adding that it is exclusive prerogative of the executive to do so. “The National Assembly should not attempt to rewrite the budget because that is the responsibility of the president. What they need to do is to approve the budget and make one or two amendments which do not involve rewriting it. It is not their constitutional responsibility to rewrite the budget for the president. Their responsibility is to scrutinize the budget, make it better and approve it, he added.

According to him, “The way out now is to do what was being done before the military coup of 1966. Until then, the budget was always done in a way that Nigerians were made to be aware of what was happening. Since the military came in 19966, the budget had always been a secret affair. Before that time, copies of proposed budget were always made available to Nigerians by the government’s printer. Everybody could get a copy of the budget at a very low cost and read it.

That is not the case now. Now it is a secret affair. Government should make subsequent budget proposal open to all Nigerians. The public should be carried along to know what is contained in the budget.

Apparently, this is one error too many. Nigerians will have to wait a little longer for the new fiscal appropriation to be passed into law. How soon this is done depends on the speed with which the two arms of government are ready to work together to resolve all the grey areas.

-Sunwp_posts