A coalition of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) under the #OpenNASS campaign, have urged the federal government to audit the account of the National Assembly between 2005 and 2014.
The group comprising of Enough is Enough (EiE) Nigeria, BudGit, Connected Development (CODE), and YIAGA Africa, insisted that there was need to open up the NASS budget to public scrutiny as the federal legislatures spent N1.15 trn ($5.75bn) between 2005 and 2014.
The programme manager of EiE Nigeria, Mr. Adeolu Adekola, who read the communique of a meeting of the coalition, said that the campaign has made significant progress in its five years of existence.
According to him, through the OpenNASS campaign, the budget of the National Assembly was made public for the first time since 1999.
He, however, noted that despite promises by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, the legislation has refused to publish the details of their 2018 budget.
“During the review of that budget, we saw duplicate items. It was broken down according to parastatals. For example, you could see something like hospital procurement. You could see it in the Senate line item, you would see it in the House of Representatives line item and you would see it in another parastatals’ line item.
“Those were the duplicate line items that we reviewed as citizens. They had newspaper allowance but there was also budget for newspapers. So those were some of the things that we saw and we streamlined and recommended a leaner budget for the NASS,” Adekola said.
On whether the lawmakers act beyond their powers by appropriating additional money to their budget, the EIE programme manager said that the court had the final say.
He said, “In the breakdown of the National Assembly budget there was a line item called Service Wide Vote (SWV) amounting to N325m. But Premium Times broke the story that the former Minister of Finance released an additional N10bn to them. The Finance Ministry later explained that it was not out of the budget of the National Assembly but it was captured under SWV of the National Assembly. If SWV was going to be N325m, how did it turn to be N10bn?”
He also frowned on why the budget of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was yet to be passed.
On his part, the Chief Executive of CODE, Mr. Hamzat Lawal, said the way the National Assembly budget is being managed makes a mockery of the democratic process.
He said, “If we look at the budget of the National Assembly, are we saying as a citizen we would accept that 469 people go home with over N150bn looking at the budget of some states, for instance, that of Niger State with a population of four million people. If we put it side by side and aggregate it with individuals, who are tax payers,’ are we saying we are enjoying our democracy based on the money that these people (lawmakers) take home?”
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