Lead Director of the Centre for Social Justice, CSJ, Eze Onyekpere, has lamented the inability of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government to present the 2016 Budget proposals to the National Assembly, one and a half months to the end of the current Fiscal Year.
He also said this was a clear sign of the current administration’s unpreparedness for governance.
Onyekpere disclosed this to journalists during a round-table meeting on Budget Transparency and Public Engagement in Budget Process, following the release of the Open Budget Survey 2015, in Abuja.
On Wednesday, November 18, Buhari sent a supplementary budget of N465bn to the Senate for approval due to a shortage of funds to carry out important projects in the country.
The President also asked the Senate to grant his request to borrow the sum of N2.10trn to finance the budget.
Speaking at the roundtable function, Onyekpere said Buhari’s ineptitude to present the 2016 budget underline would spell doom for the economy.
- “That the executive has not presented the 2016 budget to the National Assembly until now shows the unpreparedness of the current administration in matters of governance.”
According to Onyekpere, the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Commission Act, 2007, the reviewed Medium Term Economic Framework, MTEF, and the 2016 budget by now should have been approved by the National Assembly.
- “Right now, we don’t have the MTEF to underpin the budget and we don’t have the budget. The implication is that the budget is going to be presented very late and it may not be ready until the end of the first quarter of 2016, which has been the usual tradition.
“The implications are not funny for the administration of the Nigerian people.
“That means that the capital budget will be delayed and by the time they approve it in March, April or May, it will be raining season and all out-door constructions will stop.
“So we are continuing the cycle of poor capital budget implementation and of course that would mean addressing less of the needs of the Nigerian people who are suffering infrastructure deficit and also attending to less of the poor because the majority of Nigerians are poor and the budget is expected to address their needs,” he noted.
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