Why budget padding has been a perennial crisis
OUTRAGED senators at the plenary last Tuesday, March 12, literally pounced on their colleague, ranking Senator Abdul Ningi, who has been a lawmaker for the past twenty- four ( 24) years, seventeen ( 17) of which he has served as a senator after being a member of the House of Representatives.
The enraged legislators in the red chambers went after the jugular of their colleague for allegedly going rogue on them by ridiculing the distinguished senators who sit in the hallowed red chambers of the National Assembly ( NASS) via his claim that the 2024 budget was padded by N3.7 trillion naira, increasing from N25 trillion that he claimed was officially passed to N28.7 trillion, which he alleged is being implemented under the table by the incumbent administration.
But the allegation of padding, for which a sanction of three ( 3) months’ suspension has been slammed on the errant senator representing Bauchi Central, despite his backtracking, has been adjudged by some people as using a sledgehammer to crush a common housefly.
The truth is that in every organisation or union, there are guiding rules based on certain principles to be observed by members. The aggrieved senator is alleged to have broken the rules by making a mountain out of a molehill, and his enraged colleagues were not in the mood to temper justice with mercy; hence, they literally threw the kitchen sink at him. But there is still a wriggle out room as the sanction can be rescinded or reduced.
Incidentally, the embarrassing allegation of padding the national budget in Nigeria is not a new phenomenon. In fact, the current incident echoes the events of 2018 when then President Muhammadu Buhari, representing the executive branch of government, also accused the legislative arm of doing exactly what Senator Abdul Ningi just accused his colleagues of doing.
However, President Buhari was not sanctioned by the senators in the way that Ningi was literally roasted because it was during the ‘ cold war’ between the executive arm under the leadership of Buhari as president and the legislative branch with Senator Bukola
Saraki as Senate President.
Before 2018, as far back as the year 2000, then- President Olusegun Obasanjo had a face- off with the National Assembly ( NASS) over budget padding. When he withheld assent after it was passed by the lawmakers, he was threatened with impeachment, and he capitulated. Late President Umar Yar’adua, who succeeded Obasanjo in 2007, also had a similar row with NASS. Mr. Goodluck Jonathan, who became president in 2010 after the sudden passing of Yar’adua, got caught up in a similar budget padding conundrum. So, it is a perennial crisis. It did not matter whether the ruling party controlled both the presidency and NASS, as was the case when PDP was the ruling party that produced both the president and had the majority in NASS, and the present time with the APC as the ruling party controlling both branches; budget padding was always a sore point between the executive and legislative branches of government.
Even if it has been six years since 2018 when the presidency and NASS had a spat on account of budget padding until the current blowout, nothing has changed, except the actors in both Aso Rock Villa, the seat of presidential power, and the chambers of the lawmakers in NASS whose leaderships have been replaced by sucessive occupants following new elections and the effluxion of time. As Joseph Lowery, an American civil rights movement leader who was a close associate of Martin Luther King, once lamented about the civil rights situation in the United States of America, “Everything has changed and nothing has changed.”
It is the repetition of leadership flaws like the one referenced above that justifies the putting together of my latest book: “Leading From The Streets: Media Interventions By A Public Intellectual, 1999- 2019,” which is a collection of 77 articles focusing on socioeconomic and political challenges that our leaders in government have been grappling with since 1999, and about which I have written and published comments in the mass media since the return of multi- party democracy in Nigeria.
Evidently, the recorded news of many years ago as captured in the book is now history in contemporary times. That is because similar or the same leadership flaws that bedeviled previous administrations have been resurrecting, resonating, and reverberating on a daily basis in the present times, especially in the National Assembly ( NASS).
That is why those in the corridors of power in the three branches of government need to obtain the new book, which would serve as an easy reference point or source for past misdeeds by our leaders and how to avoid the same mistakes by the present crop of leaders, as admonished by Gen. Yakubu Gowon, who graciously wrote the foreword where he made the remark: “I strongly recommend ‘ Leading From The Streets…’ to all public office holders, advisers to public office holders, researchers, fellow column writers, students of journalism, and the general public.”
As if validating the wise crack by Ina G. Scott: “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s history,” in the preface to my book earlier referenced, I had made the case that: “… the book “Leading From The Streets…” is both a prophecy and an explanation in the same breath. That is because some of the fears that we had expressed about looming policy disasters that the actions and inactions of leaders in government could trigger or elicit way back in the days via our media interventions have come to pass.”
Actually, there is a school of thought driven by the belief that if a mistake or error fails to be corrected, it has a high chance of being repeated. That is perhaps why budget padding, as reflected by legislators’ endurng desire to not only appropriate but also directly apply the funds, has become a sort of regular trademark of our national budget every year. Could it also be perhaps because the masses have not expressed outrage about it hence the bureaucracy has not deemed it fit to sanction the perpetrators, possibly because it is done at the highest level of governance?
For instance, if our leaders had been guided by our counsel in the 2018 article when then- President Buhari raised the last alarm about budget padding, and we did a deep dive into the motivation and antidote, as a nation we would not have been running but remaining on the same spot with respect to the budget padding fever which has once again gripped the nation owing to Senator Ningi’s alarm.