VIEWPOINT  IN BRIEF: Setting the records straight

By Ahmed Lawal

IN President Muhammadu Buhari’s  speech while assenting to the 2018 Budget last Wednesday, he took a  jibe at the National Assembly, accusing  it  of tampering with the  budget by cutting essential projects and inserting non-essential ones. He claimed  that up to 6,403 projects initiated by lawmakers were inserted into the budget.

The President  alleged that the lawmakers removed some priority projects of the Federal Government, replacing with theirs. He also accused them of sabotaging the executive’s effort of regularising the country’s budget on a January-December financial year basis. The diatibe by Buhari  didn’t come as a surprise; what is surprising is the attempt by the President to distort facts, twist reality and incite the public against the legislative arm of government through the  claim  that the NASS had removed priority projects.

We may not like the faces of the men presently occupying the NASS, but that doesn’t take away the fact that the National Assembly is an independent arm of government with statutory duties and responsibilities. It also does not mean we should throw caution into thin wind  by denigrating an arm of government  in an attempt to look good to the public. No! Such practise spells doom for the nation’s democracy.

It is good to  set the records  straight in the face of the President’s allegation which at best could be described as an appeal to public opinion and on the other hand a well orchestrated attempt to incite the public against NASS. This is the point where we may be forced to ask a pertinent and germane question, does the NASS have the power to tamper with the nation’s budget presented by the executive? This answer is Yes.

The process of preparing the budget to become an Appropriation Bill is a shared responsibility between the executive and legislative arms of government. No arm has monopoly over the budget; monopolising what goes into the budget and expecting the budget to come out, fully approved, the same way it had gone into the National Assembly, without probing, subtraction and addition where necessary, will render useless, null and void, the principle of checks and balances running at par with the theory of separation of power as postulated by French Philosopher Baron De Montesque.

The National Assembly will be doing a great disservice to the nation and the people they swore oaths to represent if they fail to check, assiduously, the expenditures proposed by the Federal Government; any legislature which does that is called a rubber stamp legislature.

The Constitution is explicit; the President’s role in preparing the budget is to send budget estimates to the NASS, while the NASS in its own capacity is empowered to, where necessary; allocate, re-allocate, remove, add, increase, reduce or retain revenue and expenditure heads.

Meanwhile if the President feels due diligence had not been done to the approved budget by the NASS, he has the power not to append his signature and he could also return the budget to the NASS stating his dissatisfaction with what the NASS has approved. But Buhari failed to explore any of the options available to him, rather he decided to prey on the naivety of the masses, appealed to their emotions in order to sway public sympathy and incite the public against the NASS. Such cards are old fashioned.

Apparently what the President  was expecting was a type of budget passed by a docile and a rubber stamp legislature where the budget comes out the same way it went in, without  scrutiny. Such practice doesn’t work where the legislative arm is active and well grounded in its legislative duties.

The NASS has the right to scrutinize, query, apportion, vary and alter the Appropriation Bill as it has right to do so to other Bills. Buhari needs to wake up to the reality of a democratic government, this is not militocracy. Perhaps we may also need to question the duties of

the senior aides of the President on National Assembly matters. Are they not supposed to help the President out  on how the legislature works? The purpose of their appointment looks defeated with this latest diatribe by Buhari.

*Lawal is an Abuja based public affairs commentator