• Says Inserted Projects Difficult To Track, May Derail ERGP

Nigerian civil society group, BudgIT, on Tuesday called for proper interrogation of the nation’s recently signed 2018 budget by stakeholders, urging the National Assembly and Executive to significantly reduce the administrative component of the spending plan.

Funds from such cuts, it said in a statement, should then be directed towards improving critical sectors such as education, health and infrastructure, while calling for a more in-depth interrogation of the extent of the powers of the National Assembly and how such powers are exercised with great responsibility.

The group decried a situation where 6,529 new projects worth N579.08bn, were inserted into the 2018 federal budget by the National Assembly. Worse still, it noted, such projects are opaque and their implementation, difficult to track, even as they have little or no bearing on the economy.

BudgIT in the statement by Abiola Afolabi, its Communications Lead, lamented, for example, that 90.6% or 5918 of such new projects, have a unit value below N200m, just as they cannot be directly linked to the written, medium-term aspirations of the government as highlighted in the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan.

An analysis of the inserted projects, it continued, “shows that N63.64bn or approximately 11% of the new projects added by the National Assembly will be spent on various training and capacity building programmes in 2018.

“Given that the budget will be largely funded by borrowings (as highlighted in the 2018 fiscal plan), it is disheartening to discover that most of the identified line items therein show a significant disconnect from the developmental goals of government, as stated in its Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP). We are alarmed at the number of micro-projects added by the National Assembly that may not fall within the core scope of the Federal Government.”

BudgIT added that such new projects are fragmented, while the “budget line items are accompanied with vague descriptions that will prove difficult to monitor or track in physical and auditing terms.

Apparently dissatisfied with the explanations offered by the legislators already (READ), the group urged them to explain the rationale behind the increased allocations to itself, arguing that “such cannot be justified, given the abysmal distribution to the education and health sector, considering that National Assembly increased its budgetary allocation from N125bn to N139.5bn.”

It expressed worry that projects valued at N13.16bn were cancelled altogether without detailed explanation, including critical ones like the N200.3m meant to settle arrears under the national telephony programme, N100 million allocated for the Establishment of an ICT university and the N1.2bn allocated under the proposed budget for the construction of the Zauro polder irrigation project.

“Equally shocking is the fact that allocation to over 4,621 projects were reduced by approximately N318.89 bn without citations.”

It was not all flak, as BudgIT applauded the addition of N55.15bn to the health sector under the National Health Act, noting although that the amount falls short of the 1% consolidated revenue fund (above N70bn).

The allocation, it believes, is the critical starting point, urging Nigerians and critical stakeholders to monitor its implementation.