Olalekan Adetayo
Governments at all levels derive
pleasure in christening their annual budgets. Apart from naming them
budgets of a particular year, like 2016 Budget, they also come up with
catchy words such as Budget of Consolidation, Budget of Emancipation and
so on.
Since this present administration came
on board based on the change mantra of the ruling All Progressives
Congress, it was not a surprise to many that the first budget prepared
by the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the 2016 budget, was tagged
Budget of Change.
Events have however showed that there
are more appropriate descriptions for the document, far from being a
budget of change. What about christening it a Budget of Controversies?
If not that it will only be meaningful to those who understand Yoruba,
one would have considered a Budget of abiku so oloogun deke.In the beginning, not a few Nigerians
held the belief that the 2016 Budget held a lot of hope. For instance,
the APC had last year explained that it could not begin to implement the
social welfare programmes that formed part of its electoral promises to
Nigerians because the funds needed were not captured in the budget of
that year which was prepared by the administration of former President
Goodluck Jonathan.
The Office of the Vice President that
supervises the economy has been using every opportunity available to it
to inform Nigerians that the money needed for the programme had been
captured in the budget proposal currently before the National Assembly.
The making of the budget was as dramatic
as the controversies that later trailed it. The government had boasted
that it adopted zero-budgeting method as against the previous way of
preparing budgets through the envelope system.
Some officials in charge of the budget, I
recall, were camped in the old Banquet Hall of the Villa for days while
they were busy with the document. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was
invited on a Saturday to see and appreciate the kind of efforts the
officials were putting into the preparation. During that visit, I saw
the officials glued to their laptops like yahoo yahoo guys will do.
Finally on December 21, 2015, the
Federal Executive Council approved the 2016 Budget and gave Buhari the
go ahead to present same to a joint session of the National Assembly the
following day.
I remember vividly that on January 6,
2016 after the first FEC meeting of the year, the Minister of Finance,
Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, joined her Information and Culture counterpart,
Alhaji Lai Mohammed, to brief reporters about the outcome of the
meeting. A question was raised on how the government would ensure that
Ministries, Departments and Agencies do not pad the budget.
Adeosun was very categorical in her
response that such could never happen under the present dispensation.
“There can be no padding of budget when revenues are so thin and one of
the things that I think that the budgeting process is doing is pruning
down unnecessary expenditure. Let me also mention that we have set up
the efficiency unit that is going to look into how we spend money, look
at how we make savings because the money just isn’t there. I don’t think
this administration is part of that and secondly I think at this level,
I don’t think there can be anything like that,” she had said.
Not long after, the controversies
started coming up. It started with the claim that the budget presented
by the President had been withdrawn. Later, they said the document was
missing in the National Assembly. Again, another story went round that
there were more than one versions of the document before the lawmakers.
Then the issue of discrepancies in some figures also came up.
Expectedly, all these were denied by the authorities.
When the evidence became overwhelming,
the government admitted that there were discrepancies in the document
and was quick to attribute them to some government officials described
as “budget mafia.”
Just last Saturday again, Mohammed said
the budget was not padded. “A lot has been said about the budget. Let me
make it clear that nobody can ever accuse this government of padding
any budget. The total of all ministries put together has not exceeded
N6.08 trillion that was submitted. It is factually incorrect to say that
the budget was padded,” he said.
But the President disowned the minister
on Wednesday when he admitted that the budget was indeed padded. I like
Buhari for his frankness. He talks from his heart when he talks and he
is always blunt. You may not like his bluntness but this President will
say it as it is.
In admitting that the budget was padded,
Buhari said the alterations which he described as embarrassing and
disappointing made the document being debated in the National Assembly
completely different from what was prepared by the Ministry of Budget
and National Planning. He said since he had been holding public offices,
he had never heard about budget padding before this incident that
happened under his watch! What else can we say on this matter?
… and Osinbajo’s curious political meeting
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo hosted an
unusual meeting on Wednesday. That was the first time that kind of
meeting would be held under the present administration. The bigwigs in
the ruling APC attended.
They included a leader of the party,
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu; former Vice President Atiku Abubakar; the party’s
National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun; President of the Senate,
Bukola Saraki; Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yusuf
Lasun; Senate Leader, Ali Ndume; Secretary to the Government of the
Federation, Babachir Lawal; and a former interim chairman of the party,
Chief Bisi Akande.
Others in attendance were the party’s
Deputy National Chairman, Segun Oni; Chief Tony Momoh; Minister of
Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu; Imo State Deputy Governor, Eze
Madubere; and the Special Adviser to the Vice President on Political
Matters, Babafemi Ojudu.
There were many curious things about the
meeting. First, the meeting was not on the Vice President’s schedule
for the day, at least as of the time his schedule for the week that I
sighted was prepared. The second curious thing was that a meeting of
such magnitude could be held when Buhari, the leader of the party, was
outside the country. Another curious aspect of it was why the meeting
was not held at the national headquarters of the party.
It was also curious that the Office of
the Vice President attempted to stop journalists from reporting that the
meeting held. It was again curious that all participants were advised
not to grant press interviews after the session. In fact, Ojudu saw them
off one after the other to their cars to ensure that they did not break
“the oath of secrecy.”
When it became clear that they must
break their silence on the meeting, the Office of the Vice President
came up with a two-paragraph statement that was neither here nor there.
The statement claimed that the party leaders met on issues affecting the
party and the nation. Authors of the statement did not find it fit to
mention some of the issues, especially those that affect the nation.
The meeting left a lot of questions unanswered and I am sure the last has not been heard about it.
Punch
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