Fiscal Responsibility Commission, CSJ Launch Budget Inequality Index

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in collaboration with the Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC) Monday launched the Budget Inequality Index (BII), the benchmarking framework for analysing, assessment and scoring of ministries, departments and agencies’ (MDAs) annual budgets (2014-2016).

Speaking at the media launch in Abuja, the Convener of CSJ, Mr. Eze Onyekpere said that the budget BII idea came about two years ago to mainstream the discourse on inequality in the formulation and implementation of fiscal policies.

Onyekpere stated that the idea was to focus on how issues of great concern to women, youth, vulnerable and marginalised groups were considered at the stage of plan and policy formulation, during budget preparation, approval and implementation as well as reporting on the implementation of policies and budgets.

“This was at the onset of the economic meltdown in Nigeria when the price of crude oil plummeted and Nigeria had no meaningful reserves and savings to fall back on. However, this aforementioned group of Nigerians did not participate in the jamboree and bazaar that was the name of economic (mal) administration of the time. And the government had a basic obligation to meet their existential needs under several international and national standards.

“Nigeria was and is still at a fork in the road and needs to take effective decisions on its next fiscal and economic steps. Th e petrol dollar boom is over as commodity prices have collapsed, hard choices need to be made on how to expend the little available resources and new sources of generating revenue.

“Headline inflation has breached the single digit rule; real gross domestic product growth slowed to 2.79 per cent in 2015 and shrank to -1.51 per cent in 2016 whilst our population grows at a little less than 3 per cent a year,” he said.

He noted that CSJ therefore worked on a theory of change which states that women, men, youths and the vulnerable have the opportunity to be strategically positioned and have the capacity to demand for change and improvements in economic and fiscal governance.

Onyekpere highlighted that the MDAs benchmarked to collaborate with for implementation include Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, Ministry of Youth and Sports Development, Ministry for Education, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Agriculture.

Others are Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Labour and Employment and Ministry of Transportation, he said, adding that they were selected on the basis of the impact of their programming on the rights of the target of group.

Also speaking at the launch, the acting FRC Chairman, Mr. Victor Muruako, who was represented by Mr. Charles Abana, stated that inequality, wherever it exists, cannot be good for a nation.