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Eze Onyekpere
Public office is a public trust where the elected and appointed officials owe a duty of care and are accountable to the citizens who are the ultimate sovereigns. The 1999 Constitution declares that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through the constitution derives all its powers and authorities. Thus, public officers do not occupy their positions for their own interest but are mere trustees of the common will.
Budgeting which involves, inter alia, the deployment of public resources to serve the common good and realise overall national and sectoral objectives is a critical activity of government that needs to be done with the utmost good faith, transparently and with the greatest sense of accountability and propriety. The budget is such a fundamental national, state or local government document that is only second to the constitution. The implication is that budgets must be drafted in a way and manner that its key projects and activities are neither frivolous, inappropriate, unclear nor even illegal.
Sadly, this approach demanded by the law and common sense is most at times not respected in the federal budgeting process. A review of some estimates in the 2020 federal budget currently pending in the National Assembly will show the depth of the challenge of budgeting in Nigeria.
We have capital projects that give no account of the state of the ongoing projects in terms of the percentage completion and previous releases in the past budgets. All that is in the budget is that a project is ongoing. This goes to no issue and convolutes the citizen’s understanding of the process into a nightmare. Best practices dictate that situation reports be included in ongoing projects so that the citizen can make sense of the user of public funds.
In the Ministry of Environment, there is a request of about N250m for motor vehicles, which is just administrative capital as against developmental capital which touches on the lives of a majority of the citizens. In the same ministry, there are duplicated requests for afforestation nationwide and in some arid and frontline states – between the main ministry, the Forest Research Institute and the National Agency for Great Green Walls, without a statement as to the exact location of projects. The implication is that without locations, no one can even know where the afforestation projects are located to monitor how public funds were used.
In the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investments, N130m is proposed for strategic negotiations and engagements while its agencies (such as the National Office for Trade Negotiations) have specific funds for trade negotiations. So, what exactly does strategic negotiations and engagements mean? This is best known to the individuals who put this estimate into the budget. But this is wrong and fundamentally flawed because these individuals are not spending their private or family resources. This is taxpayers’ money. The budget crafters have no right to deliberately mislead the public by putting unclear and vague statements as budget heads. So, what would a budget monitor do to monitor strategic negotiations and engagements? Maybe, he starts first with a Freedom of Information request? The Industrial Training Fund proposes training and empowerment of women and youths in some vocational skills across the geopolitical zones. The words “training”, “empowerment”, “(capacity building”) are so much spread across all the MDAs that the only reasonable conclusion is that they are the easiest words which can be used to withdraw money from the treasury for mismanagement. Where are the results of previous empowerment, training and capacity building? Beyond the ones requested specifically by the MDAs, legislators’ constituency projects are awash with projects encompassing such loose words that can be said to have no specific meanings. The actual meaning and activities will require a voyage into the mindset of the persons who proposed the budget heads.
The Ministry of Labour and Employment takes this business of unclear expenditure to ridiculous heights when it provided for “capacity building on local studies in line with the administration of criminal justice system”. Pray, what is the meaning of this jargon and what has the ministry got to do with the administration of criminal justice? It goes on to ask for money to “equipping of all shortfall in equipment and resettlement in 36 states and the FCT for immediate job creation”. Then the demand for skills acquisition, upgrading and development, adoption and implementation of international labourconventions, recommendation and protocols. The purport of these estimates is only known to the key officials of the ministry. This is wrong and stands condemned.
The National Productivity Centre is asking for N7bn for Special Sustainable Development Goals without any details. This is aside from the SDG votes in the Service Wide Votes that have no details. This is the trajectory of votes for the Millennium Development Goals and now the SDGs, from the Obasanjo presidency till now, nothing substantial in terms of impact and achievements but the money gets spent. Nigeria cannot continue with this budget opacity and expect to make progress. So, the centre expects Nigerians to clap for it for proposing to spend our money for purposes that no one knows what they are all about. The implication is that the proposers of this madness are taking Nigerians for a ride. They hold everyone in contempt because if they believed we are humans, they would have been more reasonable with their approach to budgeting.
The Ministry of Agriculture has for a long time believed that opaque and unclear budgeting is a virtue. Every year, they vote billions of dollars for value chains of separate crops and animals, from maize, cassava, rice, etc. what is a value? What exactly are the votes for? Which projects, activities and their locations? The National Centre for Agricultural Mechanisation in Ilorin proposes N500m for construction of feeder roads in Lagos State. Pray, what is the mandate of this agency for it to be involved in road construction, not even within its immediate catchment area but in Lagos, the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria?
Virtually all the MDAs asking for vehicles are asking for specific foreign brands of vehicles contrary to the provisions of the Public Procurement Act which only demands functional specifications in the budget. Again, this is happening despite the local content policy of the Federal Government. Yet, we proclaim at the rooftops we want to create jobs, and we want industries to grow. How can the industries grow when the Federal Government refuses and neglects to patronise them? How can we create jobs locally when a majority of our capital projects end up using foreign exchange to buy foreign goods and services? How will the Corporate Income Tax increase if local companies run at a loss? Can we be doing wrong and expect to get right?
When budgeting is reduced to the whims and caprices of a few men and women who do not understand the strategic interests of the country; when budgeting becomes an exercise in a play on words, when it is clear that there are deliberate attempts by servants to shut out their masters from knowing what the masters’ money is to be used for, then the economy is in mortal danger, opacity, lack of accountability and transparency is the nemesis of economic growth and development. It is up to Nigerians to demand their rights, being the right to know how their money is spent.
