Nigeria’s budget 2016: Fears over weak foundation

Public opinion in the past week or so has largely featured compliments on President Muhammadu Buhari over the coming of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) even as some surprises were recorded.
The  FEC has brought to the front burner the crux of the challenges facing the new administration – the 2016 budget. Even as the administration is still keeping the main features of the package characteristically under wraps, leaked information on it betray its ambitious disposition  – especially with respect to the expected revenue of N8 trillion and the welfare status of the extremely poor Nigerians estimated to be 110 million out of the country’s population of 170 million.
In the forthcoming budget 2016 the government envisages the launch of a poverty reducing Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) welfare scheme, which will provide a dole of N5,000.00 monthly for the benefit of the estimated 110 million indigent Nigerians, and at a whopping cost to the nation of N125 billion monthly, which is N1.5 trillion annually. Without equivocation, when the idea was first mooted some weeks ago as a cardinal programme of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), many Nigerians saw it as laughable and prayed that it was merely a wishful thought by its sponsors that will evaporate in the face of superior argument.
Their fears were spawned by at least three factors that predispose the CCT option as a weak foundation to fight poverty in Nigeria. Firstly is the poor data culture in the country on which planning for the success of the programme will rest. For instance, Owelle Rochas Okorocha who is the governor of Imo State – easily one of the most educationally endowed states of the country – recently lamented that about 90% of the civil servants in his state are not computer literate. This situation is symbolic of the state of affairs in the nation’s public service and what to expect from it in the face of any data-driven enterprise as the CCT. Secondly is the inherent state of disarray in the structure and procedures within the nation’s publicservice establishment, which is expected to drive any reform including the envisaged welfare scheme.Thirdly is the culture of impunity in which public officers like the Commissioners on the Board of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), can just sit down in the comfort of their office, and mindlessly share out to themselves under conditions of questionable subterfuge, billions of naira of the nation’s patrimony, which was earned by other Nigerians for the country, only for occupying positions of public office. Who then says public office is a burden? At least not the officials of NERC; maybe until Buhari’s gaze falls on them.
As desirous as the Buhari administration is to make a change in the life of Nigerians, it cannot do so without effective planning on the way forward. This is where it has to come to terms with the realism of the peoples’ expectation from his administration, and the state of availableresources as well asreliable data, which remain critical to the success or failure of any of its programmes.
The first question that comes to mind on the CCT scheme therefore is the issue of who are the would-be beneficiaries? Who does the government actually have in mind to dole out N5,000.00 to monthly? How many are they and what are their profiles – age range, regional distribution and social standing, etc., to justify official action on their behalf? Besides the foregoing, of what use will the pittance be to these so called unemployed youth given the prevailing economic circumstances?
On the flip side, this proposed ‘favour’from the government is coming at a most inauspicious period when the nation’s stock of infrastructure is in a state of disheartening dilapidation and crying for attention, with much of such having been abandoned for some time. No thanks to the fact that in the whole of 2015 no capital project was executed by the federal government inspite of the provision of N1.3 trillion for such in this year’s budget.  At the lastcount as many as 11,000 federal government project stand abandoned with hundreds of thousands of Nigerian workers thrown out of job, and are wallowing without hope in the nation’s labour market.
Against the fore going therefore it is not difficult to see that anyinitiative aimed at alleviating the plightof the unemployed and poor, can only be most valuable if it starts with ‘diverting’ theN1.5 trillion monthly dole earmarked as pocket money for phantom unemployed youth, to the completion of the abandoned capital projects as well as new ones that may need to be initiated afresh.The advantages of all season motorable road network and other functional infrastructural facilities across the length and breadth of the country, over pocket-money for so called unemployed youth, are self-manifest. The Chinese proverb that it is better to teach a man to fish, than giving him fish to eat, is instructive in this case. The indigent 110 million Nigerians may be poor, but the majority of them will prefer to be given the opportunity to work and earn their own living, instead of depending on handouts that translate to mere pittance.
The foregoing therefore defines for the 2016 budget a narrow but most effective thrust – which is the process of laying a new and better foundation for the country’s economy through massive development of infrastructure. All that Nigerians are saying to the Buhari dispensation is simple. Build us the roads, bridges, airports, jetties, power stations as well as other critical public infrastructure. And we the hard working Nigerian people, will find our way to prosperity.
Another take is that it shall be a zero based budget which implies that projects will be subjected to actual market place pricing and allocated funds based on actual real time spending.