Tag: Budget 2016

It is probably just as well that the National Assembly has suspended discussion and deliberation on President Muhammadu Buhari’s budget proposals for fiscal 2016.  There is simply no way to move forward on a document so gravely flawed and so lacking in the basic integrity with which Buhari is widely credited.

The more one learns about the budget proposals, the more one is distressed that it was ever presented as a Budget of Change.  For it is nothing of the sort.  It is in many ways a budget of Continuity – continuity of the feeding frenzy, the financial recklessness and the sheer rapacity of the Jonathan years.  And it tests sorely the public’s faith in the capacity of the Buhari Administration to set Nigeria on a new path.

A budget of change would have questioned rigorously the fundamental assumptions on which previous budgets were grounded. A budget prepared at a time revenues from oil exports had fallen by more than 60 per cent would have rejected out of hand the business-as –usual approach in favour of something lean, even mean, if only to signal indeed that hard times are here and will be with us for quite a while.

It would have scrutinised every proposed expenditure unsentimentally, cutting out whatever is not absolutely necessary and demanding, if an expenditure is warranted, that it be met at a cost that takes into account the nation’s diminished financial circumstances.  It would have resonated with a call for sacrifice and prudence.

Thus, it would have questioned whether the President and Vice President and their families should for all practical purposes be wards of the Nigerian state, with their every need and desire and fancy met from the public purse, in a country where the anaemic minimum wage of N18, 000 goes unpaid for months.

But what do we find?

To take one scandalous example:   The budget makes outrageous provisions for the kitchen equipment and cookware and ancillary stuff  on which the previous year’s budget – and the one before it – had received outlays that bordered on the obscene.

What happened to all the kitchen equipment and cookware and related stuff provided for in the State House budget every year Dr Jonathan was in office?  Were any purchases made?  What happened to last year’s purchase, and the previous year’s?  Was the material ever inventoried?

They probably did so much cooking and preparing cassava bread in the place that at year’s end, the equipment purchased only the previous year for tens of millions of Naira – junk stuff most likely, like the military hardware acquired during the same period, were no longer serviceable.

But with a new resident in the Villa, one not given to the bacchanalia and the gastronomic proclivities of the previous resident and his train, there is no excuse for such profligacy.

This is indeed the time to consider privatising the entire catering operation at the Villa, in keeping with the public-private partnership strategy that has become obligatory for solving national problems. That way, the government pays a charge on the catering, without having to buy a new set of kitchen equipment every year.

Take, as a second example the more than N4.9 million earmarked for books for the office of the Vice President for fiscal 2016.  It is considerably less than the previous year’s outlay of N7.5 million, though the incumbent is a legal scholar and practitioner of the first rank, unlike his predecessor, an architect who never pretended to be a bibliophile.

Though relatively small, the expenditure on books for the former vice president’s office for fiscal 2015 year cries out for justification, as does the proposed expenditure in the 2016 Budget for the current vice president.

Were books actually bought in 2015?  Who determined what books should be bought?  What subjects do they cover? Where are the books now?   Are they in safe custody, properly catalogued and available to staffers of the Vice President’s office and officials in other bureaus of the Presidency?  Or did the former vice president take them away as personal effects, to be read in the leisure he never enjoyed in office?

Who determined that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s suite should boast a library crammed with books worth nearly N5 million?  What subjects will the volumes cover?  Even if he is inclined to read them all, he will never have the time.  They may even constitute a distraction.  So, whom are the budget planners trying to impress?

But the puzzle does not end there.   A cable linking one part of the Presidential Villa to other drivers’ rest room is to be installed for  some N322 million, and another linking a Guest House to the generator room is to be installed for N213 million.

How did these come to be budget priorities in these hard times?  If they had hitherto run the place without these cables, why install them now when the cost could serve more urgent needs?

Then there is the allocation of N618.6 million for electrical lighting and fittings at the Villa, and another N37.7 million for electrical distribution boards and other cables.  What happened to the electrical lighting and fittings and distribution boards and cables that previously served the Villa?  All of them went bust in one fell swoop?  Or were there none to begin with, in which case it is necessary to ask:  What then makes them so urgent now?

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Professor Isaac Adewole stopped just short of calling the budget document for his ministry a forgery.  He disavowed it, saying that it had been doctored in such a way as to upend the ministry’s priorities.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, discovered a “strange” provision of N230 million and N168 million for the purchase of computers for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and the Film and Video Censors Board.

The budget proposals for the Investments and Securities Tribunal, it has turned out, were copied word for word from the previous year’s submission.

These are just some of the willful errors, duplications, inflated prices, misplaced priorities and shoddiness with which the 2016 budget documents are strewn.  The Federal Government blames it on a “budget mafia,” entrenched civil servants who have made a career of gaming the system for corrupt self-enrichment.

This will not do.  Members of the so-called mafia report to superior officials who in turn report to the President, who is on record as saying that he took so long to name a cabinet because he wanted to be sure that he had the right officials in the right places.

With regard to the 2016 budget, this seems not to have been the case.  By their negligence, indifference and complicity, Buhari’s senior officials have caused him and the nation great embarrassment.  They have also undermined public faith in his commitment to change, and in his administration’s capacity to break away from the failed habits of the past.

They should not go unpunished.

What this budget fiasco has revealed is in a fundamental sense a failure of auditing.  Public institutions operate for years on end without being audited.  Errors, witting and unwitting, go undetected and become self-perpetuating.

No effort to combat official malfeasance, however spirited, can succeed without a strong and responsive audit mechanism.

When word came from somewhere in the Senate the other day that the entire 2016 Budget – all N6.08 trillion of it – had gone missing, disappeared, vanished, millions of Nigerians looking up to it for a reprieve from their miseries must have felt as if they had been pole-axed.

If there is one thing on which all Nigerians are agreed, it is that nothing is impossible in Nigeria.  Still, it was almost inconceivable that such a colossal amount would have vanished in a mere three weeks.  Not even Sani Abacha and the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan Administration in their cumulative profligacy and kleptomania could have made such a colossal sum perform a disappearing act so unceremoniously.

Much to everybody’s relief, it turned out that only the budget documents were missing – the tome President Muhammadu Buhari had presented to the National Assembly in a sturdy receptacle that looked like the national flag in three dimensions just before the lawmakers left for their umpteenth recess in six months.

They returned, only to find that the hard copy and the soft copies supposed to have been made for members of the Senate were nowhere to be found.  Dutiful and public-spirited as ever, they raised the alarm:  The budget documents had gone missing.

Not so, said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the other chamber of the National Assembly. The documents were intact and available, and members of that chamber were not complaining.

Still, the word out there was that the budget documents were indeed missing, and public concern shifted to what must have happened to them.

According to one early theory, Buhari had pulled a 4-1-9 on the National Assembly.  The box he had presented to the Assembly with such critical solemnity on December 22, 2015, so goes the theory, contained no documents at all, only stale air.

But how then did the House of Representatives come by what they are purporting to be Budget 2016 documents.   Were they forgeries, like Standing Orders 2015 “as amended”?

Another theory posited that Olisa Metuh must have in a fit of petulant rage eaten up the documents.  But why did he consume only the copies meant for the Senate and spare those meant for the House of Representatives?  Plus, no one can eat up hundreds of pages and not succumb to terminal dyspepsia in the process.

According to yet another theory, following the mugging the Budget proposals suffered in the news media, Buhari had surreptitiously spirited away the documents, reworked them and returned them to the National Assembly in like manner.

Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters, Ita Enang, seems to have rendered this theory plausible when he declined to address forthrightly the charge that the documents had been doctored, saying instead that the kerfuffle was “sensitive” and that both sides were working toward a resolution.

Nor did federal officials refute this theory when they described the controversy over the Budget offhand as a “distraction “and “a storm in a tea-cup.”

What is “sensitive” about a public document, the contents of which have been analysed in the news media and discussed and debated on dozens of various platforms?  Why were Enang and other federal officials less than forthcoming on the matter?

In whatever case, why would Buhari withdraw the Budget documents surreptitiously when he can with a formal letter to the National Assembly change, modify or disavow altogether any request he may have placed before it?  After all, the Budget is a work in progress.

Meanwhile, the Senate decided to take all the guessing and grandstanding out of the matter and directed its Committee on Ethics and Privileges to ascertain what really was the matter with Budget 2016.

The Committee has since “revealed” that the Budget papers were not really missing, only that there were “two versions” before the Senate.  One version has been christened the Enang Budget, and the other one credited to Buhari.

But not before the story of the dodgy budget had made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world and gone viral on social media.  And not before Nigerians had lampooned it as only Nigerians can.

One comment doing the rounds on YouTube, with a picture of a man clutching a pile of akara wrapped in paper went thus:

“If you buy suya, akara or guguru, please crosscheck the (wrapping) papers to avoid eating our 2016 Budget.”

You hear, all ye patrons of roadside food vendors.

Another had a picture of stern looking armed security officials rummaging in cluttered office:  Cutline:  ”DSS raids Metuh’s office in search of missing budget.”

Another comment, entirely pictorial, shows two men peering intently into a sewer, hoping  they might find the missing budget in the murky stench.

Yet another comment showed a long line of men trying to push a passenger down on its side. Caption:  ”Don’t joke about this missing Budget O.  They have checked the National Assembly.  Now we are in Agege searching under buses.”

Another comment shows Buhari and Vice- President Osinbajo in a lounge chair as they laughed  mirthfully, with Osinbajo proclaiming triumphantly, “We don play them.”  To which a certain BGIS (who is he?) responded, “Dem go find budget taya.  Oya, go edit am.”

Then, there is this evocative one showing Buhari in a white robe, hands clasped in supplication; the bubble from his mouth has him saying, in lamentation: “These people have come again o.  They stole my certificate.  Now they have stolen my Budget.”

One picture shows three rams, two of them chewing on opposite ends of a large piece of paper.  ”Buhari,” one of the goats said in a manner both mocking and taunting, “If you want your Budget, you can come have it.”

Amidst all the theories, the declarations and the declamations and the proclamations, the best available information – I am here taking the Senate Committee on Ethics (ha!) and Rules (ha! ha) on trust, which is a risky thing to do – the best available information is that there are at least two versions of the Budget document.

Maybe we will know in the days ahead how one version differs from the other, the discrepancies and interpolations that have been discovered between the two.

The National Budget is fundamentally a political instrument.  It often conceals at least as much as it reveals, and implementation always falls short of intent; in sum, there is always an element of dodginess to it.

Budget 2016 is no different.  The Executive Branch and the legislative Branch are locked in dodgy games of their own, even before debate has commenced in earnest.  When it eventually gets under way, the debate must not turn out to be one long exercise in dodginess.

By the way, have you heard that the Constitution has also gone missing?

• This piece was written before it was reported that President Buhari has formally revised his Budget proposals.

It is that time of year again, the release of the Federal Budget proposals, when we all become economists, at least for the three or four weeks that the plan dominates public discourse.

And why not?

After all we buy and sell and make and consume, and we are all subject to the vagaries of the Market which, to misquote Emerson, is in the saddle and rides all mankind.  And there are those who would argue that, in a literal rather than technical sense, homo economicus is no less  a plausible creature than homo sapiens.

If the statesman who led France through World War 1, Georges Clemenceau, had not said memorably that war is far too important to be left to the generals, another wise man would surely have laid it down with greater truth that economics is far too important to be left to the economists.

But don’t say that to the hearing of professional economists who have turned what used to be the engaging discipline of political economy into one of the most arcane specialisms, often involving facility with figures on a level with particle physicists; it is all equations and equations and graphs upon graphs and probabilities upon probabilities, not forgetting ceteris paribus.

Maybe that is why real economists do not take it kindly when dilettantes, to say nothing of lay people and even market women, presume to comment on the economy, a point made most eloquently by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the embattled Minister of Finance of the Babangida regime when the nation was debating the wisdom or unwisdom of taking a huge loan from the IMF that came booby-trapped with a Structural Adjustment Programme.

If Kalu had his way, something tells me that he would have made possession of a doctorate in economics from the world’s most prestigious academies the minimum qualification for participating in that debate.

He was never so incensed, I gather, as when one Bamako Jaji, obviously no economist, clinically took the whole SAP edifice apart in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Against Kalunomics.”  The Minister inquired frantically about the true name and identity of Bamako Jaji, aforementioned, with a view to challenging him to a public debate, and engaging him in single combat if that did not settle the matter.

“Bamako Jaji,” it is now safe to reveal, is none other than our own Biodun Jeyifo, who turns 70 this week.  Congratulations, BJ, and welcome to the Club.

As I was saying before I landed myself in a labyrinth of digressions, this is the time when we all pivot on the much awaited federal budget proposals to sound off as economists and experts in matters fiscal.  Although it is no more than a statement of intent that is more often honoured in the breach than in the observance, we invest it with the power of the accomplished fact.  We take the deed for the intent.  Thus, in Babangida’s time, it was not unusual to celebrate the release of the budget estimates with a sumptuous state banquet.

The hysterical Olisa Metuh, publicity secretary of the discredited PDP who is reportedly due   to keep a date soon with the EFCC in the investigation of charges related to obtainment, has predictably dismissed the 2016 Budget proposals as a fraud and a scheme to enslave Nigerians of the present and future generations.

I will steer the middle ground between the reflex exultation of the Babangida years and the schizoid denunciation that is Metuh’s trademark.

Given the steady attenuation of the Naira, it is a wonder that estimated expenditure came out in billions rather googols (a googol is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros).  And if you factor in the declining fortunes of the Naira and the rate of inflation, officially put at a very conservative 9.3 per cent, the increase in this year’s expenditure over the previous year’s at a time of shrinking revenues is understandable.

Nearly one-third of the estimated expenditure is going to be borrowed.  At first blush, this seems unwise, even profligate.  Why not simply live within your means?

It depends on what the borrowed funds are used for.  If you borrow to eat, to finance consumption, you are sowing the seeds of future economic and social turmoil.  But if you borrow to finance projects that will create jobs and stimulate demand, if your borrowing is an investment in the future, you are sowing the seeds of prosperity. Borrowing outside this framework should be discouraged.

President Buhari was therefore right to have taken a dim view of the Senate’s outrageous proposal to buy luxury American-specification SUVs – no Dubai-assembled vehicles, please, for each of its 109 members for oversight committee duties, and to replace the 10-vehicle convoy of its president with exotica of the same vintage, at cost of N4.7 billion.

It is unfeeling, and downright provocative at a time when the authorities in a great many of their constituencies are saying that they can no longer afford to pay the anaemic minimum monthly wage N18,000, which they have never paid regularly anyway.

What happened to the last set of vehicles purchased for oversight work? Where is their conscience, their empathy?  Is being a ward of the state their idea of public service?

By the same reasoning, the President should disavow the plan to buy a fleet of luxury cars for his senior officials who are guaranteed loans to buy their own vehicles, plus generous allowances for maintaining them.

And he should also raise serious questions on the plan to spend N5 billion for official residences for the vice president, the Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  What happened to the official residences built for the last holders of those offices? Will the  government embark on this kind of construction each time new people take over these offices?

It has to be said that the President’s Economic Team – who are the members, by the way? – did him and the APC a bad turn in the way it approached a Budget designed to launch their agenda of Change. The team seems to have used previous budget proposals as their template, adding millions of Naira here and shaving off millions there, instead of determining whether an expenditure is warranted in the first place.

Only that approach can explain why new expenditures are now being proposed on kitchenware and cookware as were presumably expended in the budget for the previous year and the year before that on those very items, and on computers, exotic birds for the Aso Villa lawns, and so on and so forth.

What kind of kitchenware and cookware and computer hardware is it that has to b e replaced every year?

There is perhaps no greater task before the Buhari Administration than tamping down youth unemployment.  As is the case with almost every aspect of Nigerian life, including the national population, reliable figures are hard to come by. When government officials who have a vested interest in keeping appearances rosy claim that as many as 25 per cent of young Nigerians are unemployed or underemployed, the chances are that the actual figure is around 40 per cent.

Neither figure is good for the nation’s health.  The plan to employ 500,000 teachers during the fiscal year is to be commended, but only as a start.  In recent years, not much attention has been given to adult and non-formal education on the one hand, and on the other hand to continuing education, the type that helps the newly literate stay literate.  Vocational training has also been neglected.

Programmes designed for these ends can open up at least another 500,000 teaching jobs all over the country and sustain a book publishing industry that will open up still more jobs.

A highly literate population with matching skills is a prime national asset, and few will contest the wisdom and indeed the imperative of investing in it.