Given the delay in implementing the 2017 budget, it was good a thing President Buhari last week presented his 2018 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly. The early presentation is to allow reasonable time for the legislature to do its work and ensure timely approval.
As usual, Nigerians were treated to the annual ritual of jaw-breaking figures of government’s projected revenue accruals and expenditure within that time frame. Tagged Budget of Consolidation because it is envisaged to consolidate on the gains of previous budgets, its overall outlay was N8.6trillion, representing an increase of 16 per cent from the 2017 budget estimate.
The president took considerable time to remind the nation of the gains his administration has so far recorded even as he raised hopes of a prosperous future. He talked of the managerial dexterity of his economic team that culminated in the exit of the country from economic recession and measures in place to avert a relapse. It sounded as a budget of hope in view of the numerous promises to make life more bearable for the citizenry.
But as he read out his programme for the coming year, what must have struck the citizenry is the future the high sounding financial figures hold for the teeming army of the toiling and suffering people. This is more so given the inability of the 2017 budget to impact positively on the overall living standards of the people.
And for a people under severe hardship occasioned by biting inflation, debilitating level of unemployment and intolerable poverty in the face of massive official corruption, the main concern is how the trillions and billions will put food on their family tables. That is their parameter for assessing the success or otherwise of every budget. Else the trillions and billions would seem the similitude of a tale; full of sound and fury but practically signifying nothing.
With a capital budget performance of less than 30 per cent in the 2017 budget year, there are fears that if the current proposals go the same way, the conditions of our people may be worse off. In fact, President Buhari himself captured this dilemma very succinctly when he promised in the current budget speech that he envisages that by December, disbursement of the 2017 budget would have peaked by 50 per cent. That in itself is a tacit admission that the previous budget had a less than average performance. December is a few weeks away. And one begins to wonder the kind of difference that will be made in so short a time.
So what gains are we really consolidating with such low level implementation of previous year’s budget? Expectedly, there has been apprehension regarding the capacity of the government to implement this year’s budget approvals to the letter even as indications are that some of the capital projects for the previous year will be rolled over to the current year.
Perhaps, the biggest innovation in the current appropriation bill is that out of the total revenue projections, N4.165 trillion is expected to be generated from non-oil and other revenue sources while N2.442 trillion will come from oil and gas. That sounds ambitious and a sharp departure from previous experiences given that oil and gas had been the major source of foreign exchange earnings for the funding of our development projects. Ironically, our budget implementation had suffered the vicissitudes of oil price fluctuations in the international market.
By the new policy thrust, the government seeks to demonstrate its commitment to diversify the revenue base away from the mono-cultural economy. It seeks to make the point that we can go beyond mouthing the imperative of diversification by taking practical steps to give effect to it. That is the way to go. However, it is not clear the projections that gave the government the comfort of mind that non-oil revenue will play such significant role in the funding of the 2018 budget.
The president is banking on the agricultural sector where he said a lot of progress has been made in many states. The solid mineral development sector is another area especially given on-going work in Ondo State to fully exploit bitumen resources to meet the nation’s domestic need of 600,000 MTS of asphalt import.
With the full exploitation of our domestic production of asphalt, monies hitherto expended in the importation of the commodity will be deployed to fund the budget. That sounds very promising. Whether this is achievable within the budget time frame either in part or whole is another kettle of fish.
Since we have no idea of our current local capacity for bitumen, projections that all of our domestic needs would come from the engagement in Ondo next year would appear a tall order. If we had the privilege of the percentage contribution of locally sourced bitumen to our domestic needs presently, it would have formed the basis for hope of self-sufficiency in it next year.
The other area the government places much premium on in its non-oil revenue drive is taxes. It intends to step up efforts to ensure that all taxable Nigerians declare their incomes from all sources and remit due taxes to the appropriate authorities. Other taxes from which the government intends to fund the budget include Company Income Tax, Value Added Tax and Customs and Excise receipts among others.
But the overall burden of funding the budget projections will fall back on the people who bear the brunt of these taxes. So the year under focus is bound to witness more aggressive tax drive in a milieu where a majority of the citizens, including the wealthy deliberately evade tax payment. With an efficient tax collection system in place, the government is bound to make more revenue. But it will impact very adversely on the ordinarily people who will ultimately shoulder the burden as it will eventually translate into higher prices for goods and services.
When this is paired with the directive by the government banning all forms of employment in government ministries, departments and agencies the gloom picture becomes more glaring. For a country buffeted by debilitating unemployment especially among the youths, it is curious the government intends to shut down every window to give direct job to the unemployed. It claims the policy is designed to cut down personnel overhead which is already considered high. That may well be. But government as a social contract; has a bounden duty to provide job for its citizens. Whatever policies and innovations it espouses, whatever future Eldorado it intends to build, must factor in the overall survival of the people for it to make a success. After all, these policies are for the living and not the dead. So the people must as a matter of necessity live before they can savour the benefits of such policies.
The real issue is not as much with the number of those in government employ as with the mismanagement of our collective patrimony. If the trillions and billions that are wrongly in private hands (courtesy of the festering corruption), are available to a visionary leadership, we would have by now invested heavily in social infrastructure such that would have had a major leap on employment generation. But that has failed to happen and the masses are being made to suffer the serial failures of governments’ overtime.
Even then, with regular incidence of ghost workers in governments, subsisting statistics on total personnel outlay may not be fool-proof. We are privy to disclosures of huge amounts of government monies (federal and states) paid to the so-called ghost workers. If the government further scrutinizes its payroll, it may discover to its chagrin that it may have been misled by fictitious staff data into shutting down all employment windows.
Overall, the effectiveness of a budget hinges on its capacity to improve the general wellbeing of the people. President Buhari must give a human face to implementation of the 2018 budget. Banning employment in the face of spiralling and suffocating youth unemployment and poor infrastructure for job creation is anti-people and an invitation chaos.
