EDITORIAL: Buhari's transition budget demands scrutiny

With hindsight, the examination of the 2023 transition finance bill by the National Assembly calls for an in-depth examination. The budget proposal contains an expenditure of 20.51 trillion naira, including 8.27 trillion naira for non-debt recurrent expenditure and 5.35 trillion naira for capital expenditure. It has a deficit of N10.78 trillion.

Its preparation by the federal executive and its passage through parliament has generally taken the form of a moment of bazaar, since the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1999. This is due to too many positions which strongly indicate levels questionable expenses in the document. This final budget of President Muhammadu Buhari's regime has sparked controversy over spending items in some government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). In the past, presidents have withheld budgets because of questionable post insertions, making them unduly expansionary and difficult to implement.

Very often, federal legislators and the bureaucracy or MDAs compete to outdo each other by killing the process. It is a criminal and unpatriotic act, for which no one has been punished according to the laws of the country. The MDAs sparked the first controversies last week over the N432.8 billion in their budgets, which lawmakers had questioned.

The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq, had disavowed 206 billion naira inserted into her ministry's budget for the North East development and national social safety net projects . She told lawmakers that the department requested the fund in the 2022 budget, but then it was pushed back. The Minister therefore asked the parliamentarians to address their inquiry to her counterpart in the Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed.

Spending of 10.8 billion naira under the budget of the Ministry of Defence, including 8.6 billion naira for the purchase of military equipment and 2.25 billion naira for the Safe School initiative, has considered abnormal by the Senate and the House. Assignment fees. The ministry's permanent secretary, Ibrahim Kana, said the ministry did not initiate it, prompting Senator Aliyu Wamakko's directive to remove the article. He wondered why the items were not captured in the Air Force/Navy expense wallets that usually purchase equipment for the military and Department of Education for Safe Schools Initiative projects.

However, Ahmed apparently poured cold water on all of this when she appeared before the House of Representatives with the explanation that there was no budget fraud but a coding error for the 206 Billion Naira at issue, which appeared as “Purchase of Security Equipment in the Government's Integrated Financial Management Information Budget Preparation System.” This is a World Bank funded project for the National Social Safety Net-Scale-Up, which amounts to $473,500,000, equivalent to the 206.2 billion naira in question.

Ms. Ahmed even revealed more than we knew so far. She said a total of 1.7 trillion naira of loan-related projects were planned in the 14 MDA budget. These funds are to come from bilateral and multilateral development partners, which also include N195.4 billion for various projects of the Ministry of Energy. “The 2023 budget proposal has been prepared with utmost sincerity and in accordance with established regulations and procedures,” she said.

However, is it really true that the draft budget was sent to line ministers for review and comment before the document was submitted to the Federal Executive Council for approval and then to the legislature, as said Ahmad? If so, why were these observations not clarified at the interministerial level by this mechanism? This puzzle makes it look like there could be more than meets the eye.

Similar scenarios played out in the Ministry of Health's 2016 budget. The then minister, Isaac Adewale, was forced to withdraw the entire purported budget to purge it of its strange elements. A total of N15.7 billion for investment projects had been transferred to other areas, just as the minister lamented that the funds were tied to projects where no final decision had been made. /p> READ ALSO:

In the 2017 budget, the then Minister of Works, Energy and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, disowned an odd 2 billion naira in the ministry's budget, under the expenditure subheading : "Regional housing program". ...