THE 2011 budget has just been passed by the National Assembly nearly half way into the year. The delay in consideration and passage of the budget has been a source of worry across the country these past months because President Goodluck Jonathan had presented the 2011 Appropriation Bill of N4.2tn to a joint session of the National Assembly as far back as December 14, 2010.

The 2011 budget passed its first and second readings at the Senate and the House of Representatives before lawmakers went on the Christmas and New Year holidays in December of the same year and this created hope in the minds of many that the budget would see the light of the day early in 2011.  However, during the course of the year, several events ranging from voters registration to the 2011 general elections distracted the lawmakers leading to the unpleasant delay in the passage of the budget.

Nigeria’s seventh National Assembly will take off in a few days’ time and this, I believe, is a good time to draw the attention of the new and returning lawmakers to the need for dedication and speedy passage of bills, especially those that are very critical to the socio-economic growth and development of our country, like the federal budget. Since majority of the senators and House members in the seventh National Assembly are new, they must endeavour to initiate changes in the way the business of lawmaking is done in the country.

In the past 12 years of democratic governance, several factors have militated against efficient and effective lawmaking at the National Assembly. With regards to the budget, particularly two factors have been reoccurring decimals – one being budget delays, the other being budget inflation to unrealistic figures.

Almost all budgets in the past decade were delayed for many months by the lawmakers before they were passed. Even the recent 2009 and 2010 budgets faced similar delays caused mostly by the Legislature, resulting in the avoidable poor implementation of capital projects. When the N4.6tn budget of 2010 was sent to the National Assembly on November 24, 2009 by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, it took four months before it was passed by the lawmakers.

In those four months, the budget went through uncountable adjustments, as the senators and the members of the house continued to send it back and forth.

Eventually, the first appropriation bill for 2010 was signed into law on April 22, 2010. Several other amendments and supplementary requests were afterward sent to the legislature, during the course of the year. Similar fates befell previous budgets before that one.

The consequence of these re-occurring delays in passing budgets is that funds are often not released to ministries and agencies on time to enable them to execute projects as planned. As a result, some projects are abandoned along the way; others are never started in the first place, while the delays also create room for corruption as billions of unutilized funds are systematically stolen at the end of the year.

But the delays in the passage of budgets have often been caused, amongst other things, by attempts to inflate the budgets. In many cases, the federal lawmakers’ primary aim is to inflate the budget of the National Assembly. However, in order not to appear to be selfish, they do so by also inflating many other key budgetary provisions. This way, the total sum often goes through the roof to certain figures that cannot be supported by the country’s income.

The result is that the executive is forced to return the budget back to the National Assembly for downward review and where care is not taken, the appropriation bill continues to go back and forth while economic activities slow down across the country.

The proliferation of committees in the Senate and House of Representatives itself does contribute in some ways to budget delays and inflation as all the committees try to jerk up the figures for MDAs under their watch in anticipation for certain kickbacks once the budget sees the light of the day.

This situation is compounded by the fact that there are dozens of committees in the House that work on various aspects of the budget before submitting their various reports to the House Committee on Appropriation for improvement in conjunction with the Committee on Finance. A number of committees at the Senate also work on the budget before it is finally harmonized and passed.

This wide ranging number of committees at the upper and lower chambers means that a lot of interests come into play before a final version of the budget is agreed on after several months in the process. The result is that economic activities suffer while developmental projects planned by the government are delayed because of the budget.

Almost all sectors of the economy, maybe with the exception of a very few, rely completely on public sector spending in order to survive. And since public sector spending cannot be done without the budget, many businesses suffer in the waiting, while others that do not have the stamina to survive the delay end up dying. For every business that suffers or dies, many jobs would be lost. This means that many people would drift into the cruel hands of poverty.

If this country must make any significant progress and catch up or even trail its peers from behind, the National Assembly must learn to expedite action at all times on budget related matters to avoid the unnecessary delays that have helped breed corruption and impede on the government’s ability to execute projects that can improve the lives of the people.

They can do this by dedication the last two months of every year to working on the budget to ensure that it is passed before they proceed for the Christmas and New Year holidays.

The lawmakers must also desist from unnecessarily jerking up the budget to serve their selfish aims; and one way to ensure that this is done is by reducing the number of Senate and House committees to a bearable level. The lawmakers must also display patriotism and self-restraint while working on the budget and respect the proposals sent by the executive which are done based on realistic income projections.

Ours is a country where most of the citizens are poor and infrastructure is decadent and in some cases nonexistent.  If we are going to succeed in fighting poverty and developing our country, all hands must be on deck and the lawmakers are key players in this journey.

As the seventh National Assembly prepares to take off, lawmakers must remember that Nigerians will be watching all their actions and inactions and this will to a large extent determine their fates when they make fresh bids to get the people’s mandates in 2015.

Mr. ABDALLAH AHMED a communication expert, wrote from Lagos.