Although the cat and mouse game has endured for months, last week would provide the moment for President Muhammadu Buhari to let out his irritation with the National Assembly. If the president was any dismayed that it took the august body seven long months to pass the budget instrument, more intriguing perhaps was the outcome of the exercise. With nearly 5000 new projects inserted into the original proposal by the National Assembly while at the same time cutting almost equal number of the administration’s own proposals, the president pointedly accused the lawmakers of not only distorting his projections but also of mutilating the document on which his administration’s plans and programmes for the fiscal year are anchored.
Never mind the charge about the president scoring an own goal when he opted to put his hand on a supposedly flawed document; guess the president might be forgiven for placing the interest of the economy over and above what would ordinarily pass for an unproductive turf war, even if, his artful play on victimhood would seem by far, less forgivable.
So what did the lawmakers do wrong?
I can hear a horde of angry Nigerians chorus – everything. To be sure, not a few times have I heard a horde of angry citizens’ call for the storming of the so-called Nigerian Bastille for their uncountable transgressions of which its latest handling of the 2018 budget may actually be the least treasonable. That, although bizarre, is perhaps understandable. In these terribly lean times, if you pay, for instance, a senator N750,000 monthly in consolidated salary and allowances, an unearned running cost of N13.5 million every month, and an additional N200 million per quarter pork described as constituency fund, the least the citizen would expect is that the ‘greedy fellows’ to leave whatever is left in the treasury for the hoi polloi! Clearly, the suggestion that they would rather not, can be quite frankly, difficult to bear. So much for their love for us; imagine them jacking up the budget from N8.6 trillion to N9.1 trillion, only to cut off N347 billion from the votes considered strategic by the executive. That was not before raising their own votes from N125 billion to N139 billion.
Ours is an interesting country no doubt; a country where citizens bandy the law when it suits them. I have read many of the so-called defence put up to justify the blatant heist. In all, at the heart of the defence is the claim that constitution recognizes the parliament as the ultimate custodian of the purse. I don’t think there’s any question as to whether or not the nation’s organic law grants the lawmakers the power to determine what gets spent or even how. Nor does anyone suggest that an institution that has the power to authorize the use of funds cannot move some or parts thereof around. It is therefore not about law – but morality and public policy.
Fortunately, we do also know that the obverse side of the same law charges the executive branch – exclusively – with the implementation of the budget. This of course depends on the quantum of funds available within the given year, the capacity of the implementing agencies and the will (by the executive) to get things done. Guess this is where the law clashes with reality – call it practicability!
Never mind the posturing legislature; it seems clear which of the branches that holds – ultimately – the joker! Where the executive chooses to play ball, there is at least a faint hope that something would be done – which in any case hardly guarantees that values will be delivered in the end as the funds are either stolen or where attempts are made to implement something in the name of projects, they are at best done, haphazardly, which of course explains the hordes of white elephant projects spread across the length and breadth of the country today.
And where it chooses not to play ball? They can always dangle the sword of impeachment and so risk the Bastille treatment!
Does the above serve as endorsement for the blustering and oftentimes sanctimonious executive branch? For an arm of governments whose own sins are legion, it seems about time the nation also paid equal attention to its own transgressions. A few sure stands out. One that Nigerians are most familiar is the humongous figures annually rolled out but which never gets to mean anything to the ordinary man in the end. To that we can add the tardiness and incompetence that have become the hallmarks of the budget process. Those are what have made our budgets the farce that they have become.
Having said all, it is not hard to imagine what is essentially at the heart of the turf war. It’s all about procurement and the power of patronage! The chief executive in charge of a parastatal knows what it means in real terms. The lawmakers surely do hence their endless, almost insatiable craving for a piece of the pie! The bureaucrats understand the power only too well. So do the contract-spinning weekly Federal Executive Council meetings where the subject is guaranteed to sit atop the weekly Order Paper! The absence, I am told, makes governance something of a grinding, monotonous labour!
Welcome to our self-help republic! As they say, like it was in the beginning…
Let no one therefore suck us into a meaningless war. If you ask me, I will simply say there’s nothing in this war – not for us. It is an elite game; either way, we are guaranteed to lose. What is currently playing out between the two arms of government comes to a failure of elite politics.
So, you don’t want the National Assembly to pad the budget? Fine. How about getting FEC to leave those routine businesses of contract awards to the professionals in the bureaucracy while political appointees get their hands dirty with policy? Shouldn’t the sauce for the goose be good for the gander? Or put another way, why should one be made to feel that it has a right to eat to its satisfaction while the other feels left out?