Review… The hullabaloo over the missing budget

The controversy over the allegedly missing 2016 proposed budget was not supposed to be a complicated matter at all. If the senate said that both the hard and soft copies of the proposed budget submitted to it in December by President Muhammadu Buhari had suddenly disappeared, then we should have gotten the House of Representatives to send photocopies to the upper chamber. After all, the two houses received the budget on the same day.

On Tuesday evening, Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesman, responded to the controversy by saying the document is no longer a property of the executive arm.

“Nobody except the President can withdraw the budget. As far as we know, he hasn’t done that,” Shehu said.

He further added that: “the copies in their hundreds have been delivered to both chambers of the National Assembly. By tradition, once the budget is submitted, it ceases to be our property.

“Enquiries as to where it is should be directed to the appropriate quarters,” he said.

That’s all the presidency had to say concerning the supposed loss of the most important document it has forwarded to the national assembly so far, a document that is supposed to guide its spending in 2016 as it tries to achieve its change agenda. Something certainly did not sound right.

Interestingly, the senate now says that the budget proposal is not missing. Sen. Ali Ndume who was widely quoted to have claimed earlier in a closed session at the resumed sitting of the senate that the budget documents had been stolen, now says it is not missing as it is a property of the national assembly.

This miraculous about-turn happened after the meeting between the president and the senate president on Tuesday, after which Saraki, the senate president, could not utter a word to journalists.

Read also: Incredible! Senate says 2016 budget is missing

This issue would not have been an issue at all if this administration subscribed to the tenets of open government from the start. Under former President Goodluck Jonathan, the breakdown of the proposed budget was always uploaded on the website of the budget office not later than 48 hours after its presentation. However the new government has stubbornly refused to upload its own several weeks afterwards, and has only put up the budget statement. If the breakdown was up on the website, the fact that copies supposedly went missing in the senate would not have been too much of a big deal. Not since the days before Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became finance minister has such secrecy been associated with the Federal budget.

Added to this, are the reports from Monday that the executive began reworking and changing the budget due to the several extravagant and scandalous sums approved for certain expenses in the copy it earlier presented, which did not show a break from the past. Suddenly, on Tuesday, the copy of the budget in the senate was declared missing on the day senators were expected to commence deliberation. And then it reappeared. Something most certainly doesn’t add up at all.

In a way, this issue is the fault of President Muhammadu Buhari. His snail like pace in appointing ministers meant that the ministers had less than three weeks to prepare this most important budget. Of course, embarrassing mistakes were bound to appear. And so here we are now.

Whatever the case, Nigerians will be looking closely at the APC government and APC led national assembly. Thankfully there is a budget statement which broadly shows the amounts allocated to capital and recurrent expenditure, as well as the ministries, departments and agencies. If indeed, the government is reworking the budget and wants to use this avenue to surreptitiously slip in a different copy, then the executive has to make sure everything adds up with what we already have. Otherwise, the egg will be on the president’s face.

…In from Stanley Azuakola

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