The decision by the Senate, which yesterday, passed a bill extending the implementation of the capital
component of the 2020 Appropriation Act to March next year is a reminder; if at all one was needed,
that President Muhammadu Buhari has not transformed the federal budgeting process in all his years in
office. Importantly, in his five years since taking office in 2015, the president has failed to impose any
verifiable discipline to the process and ethos of the budget. And that is a pity because all the promises
of transformation and change to the next level, were made loudly but the process of achieving it is often
trivialized and even bastardised. No wonder it has been a chaotic run so far.
The passage of the bill which was in fulfillment of an earlier request by President Buhari has, thus,
effectively distorted the January to December life cycle of the budget, which the current National
Assembly once celebrated as a major achievement. The federal legislators had returned the country to a
12-month budget cycle with the 2020 Appropriation Act, making this year’s budget to expire on
December 31, while the 2021 version, currently before the National Assembly, was to take effect from
January 1. On Tuesday, Buhari wrote to lawmakers demanding a fresh review of the budget. Dissecting
the letter, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, at a meeting with the
National Assembly leadership, said the extension will enable the federal government to execute the
captured capital projects that were shelved by Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. Ahmed also pointed out
that if the date was not extended, the government would have to mop up capital projects’ votes and
return the same to the treasury, warning that such was not in the best interest of Nigerians.
The upper legislative chamber suspended Order 44 of its Standing Rule for the piece of legislation to
pass first, second and third readings. Lamenting the situation, Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, said the
12-month budget cycle insulated the Nigerian economy from much of the harsh effects of the Covid-19
pandemic. “Bigger economies suffered more than we did in Nigeria. We went down by only six per cent.
If the budget were not passed in December last year, it would have been worse. That is one of our
contributions to the economy of Nigeria,” Lawan noted. He revealed that the Red Chamber would hold a
special session on Monday to pass the 2021 budget.
It is a sad commentary on Buhari’s style and an unflattering advertisement of his apathetic approach to
the substance and form of the national budget that the President chose his Finance Minister to lay the
budget document before the National Assembly a few hours before it closed for the Christmas and New
Year holidays. Without a question on her credentials, this delegation to the Minister, and not even the
Vice President, illustrates another poor dimensioning of the stature of presidential presence and duties
and the amplification of the absence of good personal leadership examples.
After months of prevarication, Buhari had on several occasions, put off inexplicably, a scheduled
presentation of the budget to the National Assembly. As the Finance Minister was pushing the envelope
at the National Assembly, it is known that the President was hale and hearty and actually at his desk in
Abuja celebrating the release of the abducted Katsina school boys after the government reportedly paid
the ransom demanded by the kidnappers; it was the same for the Vice President. What convenience the
delegation of authority to the Finance Minister brought is trumped by a great feeling that the President
has been derelict in his duty to own, and be seen to own this all-important national document. It is even
arguable that the office of the Vice President is not sufficient to assuage such an unseemly delegation.
The attitude of the Presidency therefore negates the cardinal place of the Federal budget in the life of
every Nigerian. The philosophy of Buhari’s leadership, rigors, priorities of vision are central to the
federal budget; and, therefore, are far more than economic projections. In a country where government
has crowded out the private sector, despite bouts of privatization, and the public sector is the biggest
business entity, the federal budget is the oxygen of national life. It, therefore, should embody the vision
and bear the imprimatur of the person Nigerians elected to the job to be their president.
With the highlights of this budget yet unpublished, Nigerians are only informed of the arithmetic of
benchmark price for crude oil as if that assumption of the arbitrary dollar amount per barrel is more
strategic than the high confidence quotient in the assembling, codifying, implementation, value for
money, monitoring, sanctioning that the President’s attitude and language should convey. This tardy
attention to the budget process implants fiscal and monetary policies that embarrass government and
everyone else with growth indices sans human index growth in Nigeria.
The take-off of the 2021 budget is for an indeterminate future in defiance of the President’s annual
avowals, in the past five years, to present early and have the National Assembly debate the document in
good time, and start implementation on January 1 as it ought to be. From the shoddy attitude of the
Budget Office and the President’s embarrassing judgement, all is late about the 2021 federal budget.
The attendant multipliers and time lags portend unfavorable results all over the economic and social
sectors. All of this is tacky and avoidable if President Buhari identified with the yearnings of the people
and adopted the budgeting process, in word and indeed, as his first responsibility tool for Nigeria.
