Our Lawmakers and the National Budget
The success or failure of any government derives largely from the discipline applied to the fiscal budget of the country. That is why utmost care must be exercised in working on it by the legislators to ensure the overall interest of the country is accommodated. Not surprisingly therefore, the budgeting process has remained one filled with intrigues and apprehensions.
Most Nigerians believe the national lawmakers often use the budgeting process to blackmail the executive arm of government, even as it causes a lot of rancour among them. We have not forgotten all the hoopla about budget padding which resulted in the suspension of Hon Jibrin Abdulmumin for one year because he, so-to-say, exposed the huge paddings that got into the 2016 budget by the leadership of the House of Representatives.
If it is not blackmail, we do not understand why the lawmakers will need five months to pass a budget. How long did it take to prepare it? The 2017 budget was presented to the National Assembly, December 14, last year.
The Senate had vowed to pass the budget before the end of March. It didn’t happen. They have since then kept promising and failing on passing the budget. Two weeks ago, Senator Danjuma Goje introduced another drama to the appropriation process, when he claimed that the police that raided his Abuja home carted away the 2017 budget documents, even though the Police denied that there was nothing about budget in the documents they seized from his home. Goje had tried to tie the passage of the budget to the release of the documents. Thankfully, the police released the documents few days after. But that did not mean the passage of the budget.
As at Tuesday, the budget had been jerked up to N7.44 trn from the N7.29 trn which Buhari presented; representing an increase of over N143 billion, all in the name of power of appropriation. Is that not what they call padding? Just wondering!
Once again, they had promised to pass the budget last Thursday. As at the time of writing this, the budget had not been passed.
And I read an interesting post on the social media: “A sick President Buhari prepared and presented a budget in December. Healthy senators are unable to pass the budget in five months, so who is sick?”