Why Nigeria’s budget fails – Don

The Vice Chancellor of the Kaduna State University (KASU), Professor Muhammad Tanko, has said budget failure is predominant in Nigeria because the executive arm at both the federal and state levels have often diverted public funds into personal foreign and local bank accounts.

Speaking yesterday at his third inaugural lecture titled: “Budgeting, Taxation and Revenue Generation in Nigeria: A Roadmap for Economic Re-vitalisation”, Prof. Tanko said good budget implementation in Nigeria remained challenging because public officers in ministries and extra ministerial departments were yet to imbibe the culture of incurring expenditures only for essential purposes to control cost.

“Public officers instead see government resources as national cake. This makes the drive for expenditure more on wanting to spend rather than solving existing problems,” he said.

He said one of the major problems of budget implementation emanated from a poorly formulated budget; which he said was primarily related to lack of reliability, credibility and realism of the source document of the budget.

While highlighting options for economic recovery, the professor of accounting and finance stressed the need to reduce the cost of governance, saying it would help reduce government spending to the desired level as the nation’s income generating capacity had shrank; hence the need for reduced government spending; particularly in terms of running cost.