Bill Budget 2013 get an early passage at the National Assembly?
This remained doubtful yesterday, despite the budget’s early presentation by President Goodluck Jonathan.
The Senate has joined the House of Representatives to denounce the poor implementation of this year’s budget.
Its Appropriation Committee Chair, Senator Ahmed Maccido, put the implementation level at a mere 30 per cent.
Speaker Aminu Tambuwal had, during President Goodluck Jonathan’s budget presentation, said the discovery of the House is that Budget 2012 is poorly implemented.
But Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and presidential aide Dr. Doyin Okupe have denied the claim.
Yesterday, the Senate said it would not consider the details of the fiscal policy, until its standing committee concludes its oversight functions on Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
The House, also yesterday, declared the excess Crude Account illegal and announced its plan to get it scrapped.
It also vowed to review the recurrent expenditure in next year’s budget in favour of capital expenditure.
President Jonathan presented a budget estimate of the N4.92 trillion to a joint session of the National Assembly on October 10.
Maccido said: “I believe even the Executive would agree with the fact that the budget has not reached more than 30 per cent implementation. The figure was collated from documents given to us by the office of the Accountant General of the Federation. There were releases, there are cash-backings, there is the actual budget itself and, based on all these, that was where we got the 30 per cent budget implementation figure from.
“So, based on those figures, we made our deductions and arrived at that figure. The onus rests on the Senate to verify that because, as it is now, we are going on oversight functions to the MDAs and not just sitting in minister’s office and bringing documents for us to look at. We will go out to the field to see what is happening.
“If, for instance, N1 billion has been earmarked for a particular project, a road project for instance, we want to go to the site to see for ourselves the level of work that has been done on that particular road.
“Is the work on that road commensurate with the N1 billion budgeted? If not, we will come back and report to the Senate that the road is not up to the amount earmarked for it.
“We will make our own deductions and conclusions and pass them onto the Senate. From there, we will know what to do. As I said earlier, it is not a matter of agreeing with the House or the Executive, but actually, we have the same stand.
“All we are going to do is to debate the budget estimates and after that, we will not touch the budget again, until such a time when we have finished with our oversight functions. These are issues we need to take up with the Executive this year.
“As we go on, we make improvements on issues of our working on the budget, not just on gas. There are issues such as the way the Sovereign Wealth Fund and the Excess Crude Account are being managed. All these issues will be raised with the President this year.
Maccido said the Senate was particularly interested in capital expenditure.
The Senate is likely to begin the second reading of the 2013 budget today.
House spokesman Zakari Mohammed expressed regret that patriotic moves by the House have always been misunderstood.
He said Section 80 (1, 2, 3) is explicit on the control of public funds, adding: “It is a creation of the Constitution that all revenues acruing to the Federation should go to the Consolidated Account. It is in the constitution; we are not making it up.
“It would not be wrong to say that the essence of the Excess Crude Account is let’s share the money because the states and local governments that shared from the account have not been able to justify the usage of the money in relation to what they used it for. “
Mohammed said it had become expedient for Nigerians to critically view issues of contention between the legislators and the executive.
“It is regrettable that for benchmarking, we are being blackmailed,” he said, adding:
“If we talk about this, we will still be blackmailed, but we have got to let Nigerians see the reasons why we are taking these actions. We must all strive to strengthen our institutions because we cannot be here forever. Institutions must be empowered to function; it should not be about the person running the institution.
“But because the money from the excess crude is kept enblock in one account, where some interests are being made, maybe some people’s ego are being massaged from it or somebody somewhere is making profit from that arrangement, they will not want it to die.”
Besides, the spokesman reiterated the determination of the lawmakers not to be deterred in their efforts aimed at making governance impactful.
“On our part, we remain focused and we will keep fighting it. I must add that there are a number of our colleagues that are bringing in motions and bills to amend the constitution. We are going to seize the opportunity of the ammendment of the costituation to take care of some of these grey areas.
“This is because we have sharing this money for about 13 years now but what can we point at as achievement from the excess crude account. That is the issue and it is illegal because all monies supposed to go to the Consolidated Account”.
Another area of possible clash with the executive, according to Mohammed, is the recurrent expenditure in the 2013 budget proposal, which is much higher than the capital expenditure.
He said the House was determined to adjust the capital expenditure upward for it to have a meaningful impact on the lives of Nigerians.
He said the House Spokesman will kick-start consultation on constitution amendment on November 8 from the 360 constituencies where interactive session would be held with Civil Society Organizations (CSO), Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO), professionals, traders, youths and other stakeholders.
