By Clifford Ndujihe

LAGOS— BY December 31, the three tiers of government would have spent N40 trillion or more, going by federal and states’ budget appropriations and statutory allocations to the 774 local councils since January 2006, Vanguard’s investigations have revealed.

The three tiers of government would spend at least N9 trillion this year. As at last December 31, the expenditure stood at N31 trillion. The figure excludes local councils’ internally-generated revenue, IGR, and some supplementary appropriations by state governments.

In 2008, the councils got N1.05 trillion as statutory allocations from the Federation Account and about N1.2 trilion in 2009.

In the eight years up to 2007, the third tier of government received N3.3trillion.

According to the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Federal Government expects N6.04trn in revenue this year while the councils are to get about N1.5trillion as statutory allocation. Federal and state governments’ budgetted N9.05trillion for this year. The Federal Government proposed N4.079trillion but the National Assembly increased it to N4.6trillion, a hike of N528 billion.

Federal budget to hit N5.25trn

President Goodluck Jonathan is seeking a downward review of the N4.61trillion budget and has asked the National Assembly to do so. However, the country might end up with an upward review because the President also requested the lawmakers to approve a N639.8 billion Supplementary Budget to address areas that were inadvertently omitted in the 2010 appropriation. If approved, the 2010 federal budget would rise to N5.25trillion.

Despite the huge budgets, the citizenry had little or no improvements on their well-being. Nigeria currently occupies the 130th spot on Transaparency International, TI, Corruption Index. Power supply is merely 3500 megawatts and so, there is energy poverty. Over 85 million persons, representing about 60 per cent of the population, have no access to electricity services. Less than 20 per cent of rural areas have some form of electricity service coverage and electricity consumption per capita is about 100kwh.

The United Nations Development Programme, UNDP’s latest Human Development Index, HDI, report ranked Nigeria as 159th out of 177 nations, an indication of low levels of citizens’standard of living, life expectancy and education. Over 50 per cent of the 144 million population live in poverty, worsened by high levels of income inequality. Under-five mortality rate is197 per 1000 live births and maternal mortality rate is 800 per 100,000 live births.

Will 2010 be different?

Given the fact that past budgets had little or no impact on the well-being of the citizenry, questions are already being raised on whether or not the 2010 huge budgetary figures, running into billions and trillions of naira, would be different. Only a couple of states achieved about 50 per cent budget implementation last year. At the Federal level, it hovered between 40 and 45 per cent.

An avalanche of reasons had been adduced for the failure of budgets in the country, one of them being graft. According to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, the nation lost over N500billion to corruption in the last 10 years. Of this, the commission said about N50billion were recovered by last June.

Corruption remained a major factor impinging on implementation of capital projects. Oftentimes, recurrent projects were fully implemented. The Chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, RMAFC, said mid-last year that the country spent N1.3 trillion yearly on emoluments of public and judicial office holders at the federal, state and local councils.

The composition of the nation’s public servants is as follows: Federal executive, 472; federal lawmakers, 469; state executives, 2664; state lawmakers, 1,152; council executives, 3096; council lawmakers 8692; and federal/state judiciary, 934, totalling 17,474.

According to reports, about 60 per cent or N19 trillion of the N31trillion spent by governments at all levels in the last five years, was spent on recurrent expenditure. Of this princely sum, about N10 trillion was expended on the nation’s 17, 474 public servants or 0.012 per cent of the country’s 144 million population.

The remaining N1trillion or 40 per cent of the budgets was spent on capital projects, which execution was a miserly 40 percent. The bulk of the unspent funds were allegedly looted or misappropriated.

Missing budgetary funds

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Dimeji Bankole, said last July that about 65 per cent of funds allocated by the Federal Government for capital projects could not be accounted for nor traced.
Mr. Jide Ojo, a public affairs analyst hinged the problem with budget implementation on the nation’s monoculture economy, deficit budgetting, delayed passage of the budget by the legislature and ineffective oversight by the National Assembly.

Other factors, according to him, are corruption, late budget releases by the relevant authorities such as the Federal Ministry of Finance, Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation as well as the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.

Ikokwu on way out of quagmire

However, Second Republic politician and one of the founders of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Guy Ikokwu, said the problem was systemic and structural. He held the view that a return to the parliamentary system or hybrid of the presidential and parliamentary systems of government would do the magic.

Ikokwu said: “The system we are employing is wrong. It is not designed to give us progress either economically or otherwise. The presidential system is wrong. It is the wrong solution for Nigeria’s polity. Unless we take a hybrid of parliamentary and presidential systems or revert fully to the parliamentary system, in which we have in-built mechanism that will strengthen the polity itself, we won’t make headway.”