Review – The 2016 Budget that was and now is

By Stanley Azuakola . . .

The smartest ones among the supporters of Pres. Muhammadu Buhari are keeping their mouths shut right now. There are some, however, who will argue to the bitter end and defend the presidency over the stunt it tried to pull last week when it smuggled a new version of the 2016 budget through the back door.
It started with a rumour of a missing budget last Tuesday. Even by Nigeria’s standards, that story seemed too incredulous to be true. By evening, Garba Shehu, one of Buhari’s spokesmen, released a statement: “Nobody except the president can withdraw the budget,” he said. “As far as we know, he hasn’t done that.”

By Wednesday it became clear that the controversy won’t be wished away after Abia PDP Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe demanded for an update on the ‘missing budget’  investigation during the Senate’s plenary.
By Thursday, it was confirmed by the senate. The old budget was indeed missing because, “what we found out is that the document submitted by Senator Ita Enang (the president’s SSA on national assembly) upon our resumption has some differences and discrepancies with what was originally laid by Mr. President.” Then the senate spokesman, Aliyu Abdullahi, made a statement which was deliberate but subtle in its execution. “The senate, in defence of its INTEGRITY and HONOUR will not work with” the doctored version, he said.
INTEGRITY and HONOUR. The senate was taking the higher ground. INTEGRITY and HONOUR are virtues which Buhari has tried to own ever since assuming office. Yet, when his mettle was tested, he did not pass. Rather than owning up to Nigerians that his team had made some omissions and additions in the first version which they shouldn’t have, he decided to sneak in an amendment. The senate, in rejecting the budget, was issuing a reprimand: That’s not what INTEGRITY and HONOUR looks like. Even though a cynic may interprete the statement as an argument by the lawmakers that “Nobody holy pass”.

In a way, Buhari is receiving the wages of his obstinacy. The reason the first version of the budget turned out badly was because the cabinet did not have enough time from their appointment date to budget presentation date to do a thorough job. Admitting that fact would have meant admitting that the president was wrong to have waited till November – six months after his swearing-in – to staff his cabinet. It would have affected a critical aspect of the Buhari mystique – that he is slow, but steady , well meaning and always right. In the end, the presidency believed that playing a nicodemus on us all in order to protect his mystique was a better option; a risk which has now backfired spectacularly.

Buhari has now done what he should have done all along and sent a letter to the national assembly withdrawing the old budget. He didn’t have a choice from the moment the senate said they would only consider the first version.

Read also: #Budget2016: Buhari admits blunder, writes N’Assembly

An up side to this incident is that the presidency listens when Nigerians complain. That first version of the budget had some unforgivable elements in it and Nigerians rightly called the government out for being no different from the one they unseated. In the past, even when citizens protest over some budget line items, the FG never seemed to ‘give a damn’. But this government went and amended some of the problematic portions of the budget. That was good. As former CBN governor Chukwuma Soludo said however, this budget (old and new versions) does not substantially deviate from those presented under the former government. The talk about adopting Zero Based Budgeting, was mostly just talk. The administration for the most part simply built on the old budget and in some cases randomly assigned figures.

So what are some of the changes made between the first and second versions of the budget? Let’s take a look at the budget for the presidency alone.

1. The amount initially budgeted for acquisition of a fleet of high-end luxury cars for the presidency was reduced from a whopping N3.6bn to N340m.
2. The amount for Buhari’s local and international trips was also reduced from N39bn to N1.42bn.
3. The N362m initially budgeted for Wildlife Conservation was reduced to N115.8m. Last year, the budget for this was N24.6m.
4. Proposed allocation for construction and provision of recreational facilities in the presidency was also cut from N764m to N12m.
5. Purchase of 33 seater coaster buses was reduced from N150m to N120m and purchase of 16 seater Toyota Hiace buses was reduced from N204m to N120m.
As can be seen from the figures above, it was absolutely important for Nigerians to protest against the details of the first version. Several of the items were indeed ridiculous and have now been amended to more manageable sums.

It needs to be pointed out that there were increases in this second budget version as well. For instance the budgets for the office of the chief of staff to the President, Chief security officer, State House medical centre and state house Lagos liaison office were each increased by N25m (so much for Zero Based Budgeting) to N27.2m, N28.2m, N3.9bn and N151.7m respectively. There was also a fresh allocation of almost N4bn for annual routine maintenance of the presidential villa facilities by Julius Berger, as well as fresh allocations of N25m to the office of the chief of staff for total overhead and another N25m to the same office for total recurrent.

There was also the fresh N795m allocated to the ministry of Solid Minerals for “website update”. That item raised several eyebrows, and forced the permanent secretary of the ministry, M.F. Istifanus, to release a statement clarifying that “website update” was an error in description as the budget line item will take care of “acquisition of adequate ICT infrastructure to ensure all required data and business processes are efficiently, effectively and transparently handled; automation and management of the mining rights/titles with online application processing, status tracking and open section for verification of valid mining license. This is to be done through the deployment of an Enterprise Resource Planning Solution across the 10 agencies and 12 departments under the ministry.”
That was the permanent secretary using a lot of words to describe what most likely could have been better summarised. For that particular item and for the entire budget, things are now in the court of the national assembly. Nigerians will expect them to do a thorough job of scrutinising every single line of the 1,810-page budget document and holding this government to a high standard. Nothing less will do.

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