RECENTLY, amid a barrage of national scandals, Nigerians were treated to yet another spectacle over the 2024 budget. Senator Abdul Ningi, the lawmaker representing the Bauchi Central Senatorial District, was suspended by the Red chamber following his allegations on the irregularities in the budget. Currently, though, there are indications that the portions of the budget attributable to some federal government institutions are decidedly opaque, and the affected institutions have become singsongs on the lips of Nigerians. Sadly, rather than offering a conclusive, data and logic-led defence of the allocations, the Senate seems to be banking on the assumed short memories of Nigerians. For instance, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), like many other agencies, got allocations which bear no specific expenditure heading. The development has naturally courted the people’s ire.
BudgiT, a fiscal policy analysis and advocacy organisation, found little or no transparency in the 2024 Appropriation Act. That aligns with the position of the Minority Leader of the Senate, Abba Moro, who said that the Senate is currently having credibility challenges following Ningi’s suspension. The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) and Transparency International, Nigeria (TI-Nigeria), also decried Ninigi’s suspension, describing it as an attack on freedom of expression and opposition rights. Similarly, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 general election, Mr. Peter Obi, urged the Senate to come clean on the alleged N3 trillion padding in the 2024 budget. However, speaking in defence of the Senate, President Bola Tinubu claimed that those who alleged budgetary shenanigans had poor knowledge of budgetary arithmetic. The president gave this verdict while hosting senators to Iftar, the breaking of the Muslim fast, at the State House. His words: “I know the arithmetic of the budget and the numbers that I brought to the National Assembly, and I know what numbers came back. I appreciate all of you for the expeditious handling of the budget. Thank you very much. Your integrity is intact.”
To be sure, the president’s defence of the National Assembly has not changed the obvious opaqueness of the 2024 budget. Apparently, the president was trying to find the proverbial “soft landing” for the legislators who, as experience has shown, have almost always joined the executive in short-changing the Nigerian people. The president’s “arithmetic” background, a reference to his accounting vocation, constitutes no refutation of the allegations on the budget. The fact is that the entire budgetary process is not transparent. While applying its rules, the Senate should follow due process: the converse is corruption. The so-called constituency projects are bogus and are the legislators’ means of looting the treasury. For instance, budgeting billions of naira for deep freezers without giving specific details is nothing but brigandage. What we expect as constituency projects are developmental schemes covering roads, agriculture ( for instance, disease-resistant seedling, farming inputs, drones for farm security); health, ICT and education, among others, not the purchase of deep freezers! How can money be voted without specific details? The Senate has not shown that the welfare of the people come first.
While making no case for or against the suspended Senator Ningi, we are concerned that there are too many unanswered questions on the budget. We expected the president to be bothered by the processes of budgeting which have been reflective of corruption for so long as to normalise infractions. Certainly, the way the Senate has responded to the current allegation by Senator Ningi shows glaringly that nothing positive has been learnt and that those invested in the budget system are set in their pernicious ways. Just how could the Senate and its leadership think that all would be well with their assigning of humongous sums of money to themselves in the budget in the name of constituency projects? The Senate leader, Bamidele Opeyemi, even worsened matters in his submission on the Ningi issue. He said that he was not apologetic about the huge allocations and that Nigerians should only be worried if the concerned senators did not, at the end of one year, provide evidence of procuring boreholes and such incidentals in their various constituencies to match the allocations. The Senate Leader must answer this question: were senators elected to become project contractors?
Nigerians must ask themselves at some point whether they will to continue to stomach irresponsible rulers who think they are doing the pubic a favour by corruptly enriching themselves through the budgetary processes. Surely, Nigeria is not the only country practising democracy. What kind of democracy turns legislators into contractors remorselessly allocating humongous sums out of the collective resources to themselves for the so-called constituency projects? The way democracy is headed in Nigeria, it is clear that the same people presiding over it will be its pallbearers. The apparent irresponsible behaviour at all levels of legislative activities in Nigeria is advertised by the show of shame at the Senate. The president’s defence of this atrocity signifies that those seeking redemption from politicians are only waiting for Godot.
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