By Josef Omorotionmwan

Who is afraid of the National Assembly? We have no reason to think that our Presidents are not. During the administration of the late President Musa Yar’ Adua, the man developed cold feet whenever it was time to appear before the National Assembly to present his budget proposals.

The 2007 and 2008 proposals suffered not less than four deferments each in the dates of presentation before they finally limped into the National Assembly.

We debit whatever happened in 2009 and 2010 to the period of uncertainty. That was when the President was already ill and Goodluck Jonathan had not fully stepped in.

By the time Dr Jonathan became the substantive President, the default got even worse. We soon lost count of the number of deferments suffered by the 2011 and 2012 estimates.

Usually, people would capitalise on your weakness. The National Assembly has since picked up President Jonathan’s phobia to appear in their hallowed chambers. On July 18, 2013, this column discussed, at full length, how the National Assembly offered the President a unique opportunity to x-ray the political, economic and social health of the nation as well as showcase himself and his administration’s policies and programmes to the world.

While we were yet commending the National Assembly for the bold initiative, the President probably saw it as a Greek gift and he quickly went to work to kill it by employing various tactics, including the argument that it was a duplication of theprovisions of the 1999 Constitution.

So far on the 2013 Appropriations, he has twice written to the National Assembly of his intention to come and perform the annual ritual and he has twice failed to appear before the Assembly. He has now started coming up with ludicrous excuses for his failures.

We overheard him thinking aloud that a section of the National Assembly had planned to boo him. We are not about to be carried away by why that should happen or not. Rather, our President must be quickly informed that he probably needs a seminar on the fact that from time, booing has been an instrument for expressing opposition in parliament. We have watched very turbulent sessions of the British, Canadian and other parliaments of the world. While the Prime Ministers were being booed, they waded through their presentations and were finally applauded by the government bench. That’s leadership!

Recently, there was a town hall meeting of the National Conference Planning Committee in Benin City. We do not believe that Governor Adams Oshiomhole did not know that a rented crowd was awaiting him at the venue. He deliberately went there to show that there was a difference between the men and the boys. No sooner did he start to speak than the hirelings went to work with the active connivance of one of the Committee members. Oshiomhole waded through to the total consternation of his detractors. The rest is now history.

Leadership is not always a tea party. You must also be prepared to swallow the bitter sips when they appear. You cannot be butchering a big animal and be running away from blood.

We also hear of this loose reference to the Medium Expenditure Framework in which the President claims that the disparity between the two Houses of the National Assembly on the benchmark of our crude oil was the reason for the last deferment. This simply suggests that the President was not ready in the first place. It means that what he was bringing to the National Assembly was a temporary assignment. Some salient questions must be answered here: Must there always be a universally agreed benchmark before a budget is presented? Does the budget office of the National Assembly not have the right to collect its independent data and make same available to its members? Is the President expecting that whatever he submits to the National Assembly will be passed without any input of the National Assembly?

The benchmarks of a thing and the Excess Crude Account, ECA, have since become the bane of our society. Excess crude is excess fraud. The excess crude account is like stolen money for which no proper account can be expected. A man has N1000. He decides to keep N500 in the bank where it can be properly accounted for and the balance is kept under the pillow and in calabashes, where all hands can be dipped into it at will.

This may seem simplistic but that is what the ECA represents. The ECA is extra-budgetary. It is a veritable source of slush funds of all sorts, particularly campaign funds. In an election year, the benchmark gets drastically marked down so that the ECA can be fully enhanced. The likes of our President prefer this because they do not need any approval from anyone to pull out any amount from the account.

And this is where the states and local governments are having a raw deal in the hands of the Federal Government.  The money in the pool is supposed to belong to the three tiers but it is the Federal Government that operates and runs the account. The balanceof the account is what the Federal Government says it is.

We have suggested elsewhere that there is need for a separate office of theAccountant-General of the Federation as distinct from that of the Federal Government. The 36 states have cried to the high heavens about the illegality of the ECA, particularly the decision of the Federal Government to transfer the balance of the Sovereign Wealth Fund, SWF, into the illegal account.

The states have approached the Supreme Court to order the Federal Government to collapse the ECA into the Federation Account but to no avail.

We have deliberately avoided blaming Jonathan for his actions. If a man has an inexhaustible dark pool from which he can draw any amount, why shouldn’t he be afraid to openly ask for pittance, which will, in fact, amount to self-betrayal?