Budget 2017: As public angst builds over delay

The current stint as Acting President for Vice President Yemi Osinbajo came with considerable sympathy for him, following the wide spread perception that he was likely to be denied the full swathe of executive powers to act accordingly. The premise for the sympathy was the rather ambiguous wording of the letter conveying his stand-in role for President Muhammadu Buhari, who was proceeding abroad for medical treatment. With the controversy over that twist relatively over, public attention quickly and rightly returned to the burning issues of the day with the delayed 2017 budget on the front burner.

Even as he was taking up the reins of office as Acting President based on a letter from President Muhammadu Buhari dated May 7th 2017, the 2017 budget was still with the National Assembly, with the public hanging on the expectation that he was eagerly awaiting the document for assent. Media reports celebrated Osinbajo’s readiness to assent to the budget as if it was a gospel truth. The National Assembly eventually sent the document to the Presidency on May 16th 2017, with the same public expecting a prompt follow-up with the assent by Osinbajo. Media reports even had it that Wednesday June 1st 2017 was slated for the exercise and both the President of the Senate Bukola Saraki and Speaker House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara were invited to the State House for the purpose. But that was not to be as the anticipated quick assent quickly lapsed into prolonged limbo, with the Presidency singing a different tune that it was reviewing the document before Osinbajo’s assent. At the time of writing this article no date had been fixed for the assenting exercise, according the Senior Special Adviser to the President on National Assembly Matters, Senator Ita Enang, who spoke to Reuters.  

Given the perceived comfort of the Presidency over further delay of the budget even at the middle of the year, it is not likely that the echoes of the raging angst of Nigerians on the streets, have penetrated the forbidding walls of Aso Rock. While the Presidency may be working on the hunches of its operatives who may still be looking at areas of the budget to tamper with (padding?), the public take on the delay includes outlandish dimensions; one of which is the growing rumour that the document has been taken to Buhari’s hospital bed in London for him to scrutinise it himself. If that is true then his doctors will not only determine when he will return to Nigeria, but even the economic fortunes of the country, since he can only attend to non clinical matters including sighting  the 2017 budget document, only at their discretion. That is vintage Nigeria!

Numerous studies of administrative systems provide irrefutable evidence that often, government constitutes just a conspiracy by a few disposed hijackers of the levers of state power, to pursue their narrow personal interests and aggrandise themselves at the expense of the wider unsuspecting society. The Nigeria governance terrain is replete with concrete examples of such tendencies, especially with the recent revelations of undisguised theft of humongous stocks of public funds and property as clear evidence. This situation has to a large extent eroded public confidence in the various institutions of government in the country and at the various tiers of governance. With the promise of change by the present administration the first challenge it faced at inception was to establish credibility in the eyes of the public that it can no more be business as usual. 

The President who was elected into office largely on the basis of his public image of forthrightness and incorruptibility has unfortunately been handicapped by a gnawing state of ill health which effectively reduced his capacity to confront the ills of the society as he would have desired. The lot then falls on Osinbajo as the Vice President to provide the needed critical support for Buhari, whether on seat or otherwise. It is in that context that Osinbajo’s stint as Acting President enjoys expression. In the same vein, Nigerians expect no slack in the course of governance, given the presence of Osinbajo on the mark. 

But by extending delay in assenting to the 2017 budget, the Presidency is actually postponing the document’s launch into the orbit of relevance to the economy, and thereby creating the spectre of an inexplicable lacuna in its agenda to redress the pains of the long suffering masses. For the purpose of clarification, it is trite to state that given its antecedents the 2017 budget remains one dispensation that should not suffer any form of delay. The fact that its cycle was launched during the onset of the present state of recession of the Nigerian economy, defines the urgency with which it should have travelled through its rites of passage. Besides the foregoing, the 2017 budget offers the administration a most disposed platform to correct the fallouts from the series of avoidable policy flip flops that characterised the early months of its ascent into office, and are believed to be partly responsible for the recession. Hence the prolonged delay in the launch of the budget actually translates in a sense to the government shooting itself in the foot, which is hardly wisdom.

At a value of N7.289 trillion the 2017 budget remains perhaps the most target-oriented economic plan of the country, especially in the light of the prevailing exigencies in the land which it is designed to address. Its component parts which are intended to drive the country out of the present recession comprise the following: Capital expenditure – N2.058 trillion; Recurrent N2.9 trillion; Statutory Transfers N419 billion and Debt Servicing N1.6 trillion. Ambitious as these provisions may be, they all require one critical denominator – time, to prove workable. And that is what the delay from the Presidency will deny these lofty provisions, as well as serve as the incubus that consigns the 2017 budget to the bloated rank of Nigeria’s budgets that failed on arrival.

Meanwhile, the hunger and anger in the land, continue.