The Senate has promised to pass the 2013 Budget before the end of this month. But, unresolved differences between the legislature and the executive may frustrate the bid. Assistant Editor ONYEDI OJIABOR reports moves being made to achieve the feat.
The Senate is determined to pass the 2013 Appropriation Bill on or before December 20, 2012 when it is expected to go on the Christmas break.. If the lawmakers succeed, the feat will mark a major shift from the awkward practice of the annual budget being repeatedly passed in the following fiscal year.
The 2012 Appropriation Bill, for instance, was embarrassingly passed in March by the Parliament and signed into law in April. It has to be stated, however, that the late passage of the Appropriation Bill is not entirely the fault of the National Assembly.
Late presentation of the bill by the executive arm of government has been largely blamed for the inability of the Parliament to endorse the fiscal document on time.
This year, if the optimism of the Senate President, David Mark, is anything to go by, the trend of late passage of the budget will become history.
Mark has already given the matching order to standing committees of the Senate to submit the reports of budget defence by ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to the joint Senate Committee on Appropriation and Finance for compilation and presentation to the Senate.
The matching order was not without a warning, apparently, to drive home the need for compliance. Mark warned that the joint Senate Committee on Appropriation and Finance is at liberty to adopt spending estimates submitted by the executive if any committee fails to submit its report.
Good as early passage of the Appropriation Bill may be, National Assembly watchers are worried that Nigerians may never know to what extent the parliament has been able to scrutinize government spending estimates over the years.
Some of the observers believe that it is possible that the lawmakers have never examined government spending proposals as closely as the law empowers them to do.
Some blame the anomaly on limited time available to the parliament to perform this all important duty while others lay the blame on increasing size of government and its MDAs.
Yet another group say the problem should be attributed to lack of fiscal expertise, skill, proficiency and capacity to conduct in-depth forensic examination of government spending proposals.
Although a number of the senate committees showed signs of seriousness in the examination of the fiscal estimates of MDAs under their supervision, others glossed over the exercise.
Some of the committees even held their budget defence in camera creating the impression of a hidden agenda in an exercise that should have been conducted in the open.
The business as usual attitude of some committees in the consideration of the budget proposal left desperate MDAs with disproportionate and obviously bloated budget figures.
Some MDAs that were obviously not prepared to defend their budgets simply appeared in the Senate to fulfil all righteousness.
Some MDAs also deliberately denied parliamentarians valuable facts that would have assisted them to do a thorough examination of the proposals.
As if that is not serious enough, most of the revenue yielding agencies did not appear before the Senate Committees to defend their budget as stipulated by law.
The refusal of the agencies to present their spending plans before the parliament for scrutiny may have underscored the widely held view that “a government that is less and less accountable to parliament, is hardly able to account at all.”
The worrisome situation re-enforces the perception by most Nigerians that their elected representatives may never know how much accrues to government in any fiscal year.
It should also be said that the refusal of some revenue yielding agencies to present their budgets for examination is part of the persisting culture of impunity in the country.
Section 80(4) of the Constitution clearly stated that “No moneys shall be withdrawn from the Consolidated Revenue Fund or any other public fund of the Federation, except in the manner prescribed by the National Assembly.”
While some government agencies have consistently paid no attention to the constitutional provision, others hide under nebulous justification to flout the provision.
That may explain why pervasive corrupt tendencies are prevalent in most of the agencies.
The idea that over the years budget defence by MDAs has been largely reduced to a jamboree or at best an annual budgetary ritual may also explain why the federal government has not really been bothered about budget implementation.
The unhealthy situation of poor budget implementation is not helped by instances of failure of oversight.
What the MPs did with the 2012 spending plans was more or less “garbage in garbage out” as the National Assembly virtually returned the budget estimate as presented by the Executive.
The MPs claimed that the decision to adopt the budget proposal as presented by the Executive was to avoid being accused of “padding” the budget.
If the measure was meant to engender improved implementation of the budget, that was not to be.
The level of implementation of the 2012 budget has remained a source of friction between members of the National Assembly and the Presidency.
Those in the know say that the level of implementation of the budget is no more than “35 per cent”.
The Presidency faulted the claim saying that the budget achieved over 69 per cent implementation as at September.
The House of Representatives, particularly, cried blue murder and threatened not to have any thing to do with the 2013 budget until the Executive showed sufficient reason why it failed to implement the 2012 spending plans.
Though the House later soft-pedalled after several entreaties by some influential Nigerians, the perception that the Executive arm of government may not be interested in implementing the budget has subsisted.
In the Senate one of the agencies that received several knocks over its activities is the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P).
The joint Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Petroleum (downstream), which examined the spending plans of the SURE-P asked the government to scrap the agency for allegedly spending huge sums of money on moribund projects.
For some members of the joint committee, SURE-P has failed to impact on the lives of Nigerians through clear cut infrastructural provision.
But the Dr. Christopher Kolade led agency disagreed with the lawmakers.
A member of the Committee, Hon. Peter Akpatason (Akoko-Edo Federal Constituency) felt that all the interventions made by the SURE-P fell into existing projects of the Federal Government being handled by relevant agencies.
Akpatason said, “Our belief is that road projects, the most prominent like the East-West road, is the responsibility of the government. East-West road has been there over the years and funds have been appropriated for its construction. Why is it that it is the same thing the ministries have been doing that SURE-P is putting money into? What is the job of the ministries? If the ministries were efficient, why are we having this backlog of uncompleted projects?
“We are of the opinion that the SURE-P should be fully responsible for identifying new projects and participating in the procurement phase to the extent of awarding contracts and financing such projects. But if SURE-P is to continue to finance portions of projects that ministries have been responsible for, then there is no need for it to continue to exist.”
For Senator Danjuma Goje, the existence of SURE-P is an indication that the Federal Government has lost confidence in the ability of the ministries to carry out their mandates.
The former Gombe State governor insisted that the money given to SURE-P ought to have been given to the ministries.
“I see confusion and duplication of functions some where in all these. It is either you give the money to the ministries or you give SURE-P the money. It is not neat for one person to award a contract and another person pays for it,” Goje said.
The lawmakers saw SURE-P as another avenue to spend money on overhead even with the growing concern that overhead is taking a large chunk of the national budget.
Kolade told the lawmakers that N135 billion accrued to the agency in 2012 as Federal government share of the partial deregulation petroleum downstream of the oil industry.
He listed some projects where the funds have been applied to include social safety nets like maternal and child health, public works for youths, mass transit, vocational training centres and culture and tourism (capacity building) which he said gulped N16.7billion.
Kolade also told the committee that the agency augmented the construction of the East West Road, Lokoja-Abuja Road, Benin-Ore-Shagamu Road, Kano-Maiduguri road, Port Harcourt-Enugu-Onitsha Road and the second Niger Bridge (counterpart funding) to the tune of N27.34billion.
He added that the sum of N9.276billion has been spent on the Lagos-Kano, Port Harcourt – Maiduguri, and Kano – Abuja rail project while the agency spent N299million on consultancy and logistics. He also gave the committee’s breakdown of expenditure.
Observers say that it is interesting that the MPs may pass the budget before the end of the year. A feat, they say, has never happened since the return of democracy in 1999.
But what is of more interest, they declared, is that the parliamentarians should learn to do the needful – track expenditure of appropriated funds by MDAs through purposeful oversight.
