•With prudent management of resources, we can still do something despite our meagre earnings
Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun must have shocked not a few when she sensationally declared at the quarterly presidential business forum in Abuja last week that the size of the nation’s budget can hardly make a difference in the face of the nation’s economic woes.
“Our budget size is too small and that means we can only pay salaries in some cases and we don’t have money to deliver essential services…There simply isn’t enough money in government to do what government wants to do. I’m sure you will say that is because people are stealing or because you are wasting money, but I’m saying even if you plug all the stealing and all the waste, the budget size is not big enough”, she reportedly told her audience adding – ”Statistics shows our tax to GDP at 6%, Sub Saharan Africa average 17%, Asia 26%, most of the emerging markets and the advanced countries are at 30-35 percent”.
The minister is, to some degree, wrong. Wrong because the statement stems from a grave misunderstanding of the budget trajectory in what is undeniably, an incremental developmental process. Worse, it glosses over the epochal achievements recorded under the first and second national development plans, a period under which, despite the modest funds available, some of the landmark infrastructure being enjoyed in the country today were provided. Equally hard to swallow is the implicit denial of humongous cost of the fiscal brigandage; the unparalleled indiscipline and the lack of will that have lately, attenuated successive budgets – the cumulative effects of which laid the economy prostrate.
On the other hand, the minister is also right. In the face of the unprecedented infrastructure gap which the National Integrated Infrastructure Masterplan (NIIMP) projects would require $2 trillion spend over a 30-year period, the current fiscal arrangement would seem like a droplet of water in the ocean of the nation’s infrastructure needs. The country would most certainly require additional revenue sources, either through taxation or massive borrowing. Of that, there can be no denial.
In a fundamental sense, the crux of the nation’s problem is the trajectory of waste, profligacy and heist which appears to grow in proportion to its revenue. A telling illustration of this is the immediate past administration which, although raked in more revenue than those before it (about N51 trillion), yet borrowed more with very little to show for it.
The emphasis on size would in the circumstance be misplaced. Again, were size to be everything, the humongous fortune, reckoned to be in excess of $20 billion, sunk into the power sector between 1999 and 2015 ought to have translated into significant improvements in the sector. What about the billions appropriated for Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of the refineries? Was the issue one of size or criminal diversion? What of the now infamous Siemens-appointed upgrade of some select teaching hospitals that became a major avenue to fleece the treasury of billions of naira? Or the scores of white elephants currently dotting the national landscape which contractors abandoned as soon as funds were appropriated and the contractors mobilised?
Had these projects been allowed to deliver value to the public for which they were meant, would they not have significantly shrunk the huge infrastructure gaps currently deemed to be the highest ever?
The point is that not even the most affluent nations have all the money they need to finance their public expenditures; were the contrary to be the case, there would hardly have been any need for the annual fiscal instrument– which essentially is about reordering and prioritising national needs in the face of competing demands.
While it is true that the country’s tax to GDP is low, even at that, we expect that the leadership ought to have passed the stage of whining or perennially bandying dry statistics to justify government’s unbridled appetite for funds even when issues of value-for-money remain anathema to it.
Much as we have nothing against the Federal Government’s renewed drive to grow tax revenue, that itself must come with the responsibility of efficiency and transparency in the management of what is available.