THE Fiscal Responsibility Act, FRA, a 2007 law that expects prudent management of public finances from governments and their agencies is observed mostly in breach as cases of outright malfeasance show.

The FRA was meant to track and prevent conducts that were likely to result in abuses in use of public finances.

Reports of how the House of Representatives obtained a loan of N10 billion for its operations is a fragrant breach of the FRA which the same House passed into law in 2007. When legislators are lawless is it any wonder that most of our laws are never observed?

Section 44 (1) of the FRA states that, “Any government in the Federation or its agencies and corporations desirous of borrowing shall, specify the purpose for which the borrowing is intended and present a cost benefit analysis, detailing the economic and social benefits of the purpose for which the intended borrowing is to be applied”.

According to Subsection (2), “Any borrowing requires the existence of prior authorisation in the Appropriation Act or Law for the purpose for which the borrowing is to be utilised”.

The key evidence that the N10 billion loan was not in the 2011 Appropriation Act is the prompting from the National Assembly bureaucracy in January 2011, reminding the House to include the expenditure in the 2011 budget, though it had started expending the loan since last October.

A unilateral increase in the allowances of members from N22 million quarterly to N45 million, was the major reason for procuring the loan. There is no proof that the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC, is aware of this last minute move of the House as the last legislative year closed.

Remarkably, since late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua signed this law in December 2007, a subtle violation of the FRA commenced.

It took almost two years after the law was signed, for the National Assembly to screen members of the Commission.

The presence of the Commission was thought capable of curbing the excesses government agencies like the National Assembly which tend to operate above the law.

Yet the Commission was in office while the House of Representatives used public funds as it pleased. Exactly what does the FRA do beyond adding to the layers of bureaucracy? The question is pertinent in the light of the reports of malfeasance that would dominate the media for months as new administrations evaluate how their predecessors used public funds.

Section 48 (1) of the FRA urges government “to ensure that its fiscal and financial affairs are conducted in a transparent manner and accordingly ensure full and timely disclosure and wide publication of all transactions and decisions involving public revenues and expenditure and their implications for its finances”.

Laws are useless if they are not enforced. Flagrant abuses of laws make them more useless, especially when the violations are from the National Assembly, the lawmakers.

The issue in the House of Representatives N10 billion is not so much about how the money was used as to whether the loan met the stipulations of the FRA – a law the National Assembly made.