On Thursday, October 8, 2020, President Muhammadu Buhari presented a proposed budget of N13.08trillion for Year 2021 to a joint session of the National Assembly.
The proposal was to fire instant curiosity, following realisation that it had an increment of over N2 trillion, when compared with the 2020 Appropriation Act.
For many hapless Nigerians, who have seen, in quick succession, withdrawal of subsidy on petroleum products and increased taxation, as well as above 100 per cent hike in electricity tariff, the expectations were that the burden of the new economic realities would be borne by all and sundry.
But as a cursory examination of the budget of the three arms of government indicate, the austerity measures remain a yoke tailor-made only for ordinary folks – as a scrutiny of the budgets of the last 5 years indicate.
In the following analysis, Ben Bakare notes that despite repeated calls for a cut in the cost of governance, the Presidency continues to maintain a budget that continues to bloat, even as the nation faces yet another grim recession – a development which the president referred to in his budget presentation speech.
NASS’s controversial budgets
For years, attention has been on the budget of the National Assembly, with little or no heed paid to that of the presidency. Interestingly, the budget of the presidency have moved from N44,680,477,626 in 2016 to over N72 billion in the 2021 budget proposal.
The budget of the Legislature and the Judiciary are under statutory transfers, which means they are institutions whose funding are guaranteed by law. These two institutions, alongside the Niger-Delta Development Commission, Universal Basic Education, Public Complaints Commission, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), National Human Right Commission, North East Development Commission and Basic Health Care Fund, get lump sum funding without details – unlike that of the presidency, ministries, department and agencies where details of their expenditure are broken down in the budget.
For several years now, the National Assembly’s budget has remained a source of controversy and friction between the Legislature and the Executive, oftentimes leading to Nigerians being pitched against the parliament.
To, perhaps, lay the matter to rest, in 2018, the then Senate President, Bukola Saraki, for the first time, gave the public a glimpse into the budget of the National Assembly by publishing its 2018 budget.
The document showed that the National Assembly got N139 billion as allocation; and while N35.5 billion was allocated to the Senate, N57.4 billion was earmarked for the House of Representatives; N10,202,095,928 for legislative aides; N15,389,235,912 for the National Assembly bureaucracy; and N2,736,081,266 for the National Assembly Service Commission.
Also, the National Assembly Legislative Institute got N4,373,813,596, while N1,145,143,254 was appropriated for service-wide vote of the legislature.
The Presidency, on the contrary, runs an open budget, as details of the Presidency’s budget are always available in the Appropriation Act. It is noteworthy, however, that the following establishments fall under the budget of the Presidency: State House, President’s office, State House Liaison House, Lagos, Vice President’s office, Chief of Staff to the President, office of the Chief Security officer to the President, Office of The Chief Economic Adviser to the President, Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission & Its Centres, and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI).
Also under the Presidency are the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) (no longer under the presidency’s budget since 2020 due to the establishment of the Ministry of Humanitarian affairs), Bureau Of Public Enterprises (BPE), National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru and the Nigerian Financial Intelligent Unit (NFIU).
The rise of allocations to the three arms of government since 2016
In 2016, the total budget of Presidency was N44,680,477,626, made up of
N21,676,277,927 for recurrent expenditure and N23,004,199,699 as capital expenditure. In that same fiscal year, the National Judicial Council got N70 billion while the National Assembly was allocated N115 billion.
The 2017 fiscal year was to record an increment in allocation to the three arms of government, as N30 billion was added to the budget of the judiciary from the 2016 allocation of N70 billion, to make it N100 billion in 2017, while the National Assembly also had a N10 billion increment, to make its total N125 billion.
Notedly, the budget of the Presidency did not increase that year. Rather, it decreased from the previous year’s with a reduction of N1,666,811,411 from the N43,013,666,215 allocation in 2017.
In 2018, the judiciary had another N10 billion increment to bring its budget to N110 billion, with the National Assembly securing a N13.5 billion addition to it’s previous year’s budget.
Not to be outdone, the executive was not left out this time around, as it recorded an increment of N16,329,686,867 to bring its budget to N59,343,353,082.
In 2019, the Presidency proposed the same amount as in 2019, but the Judiciary budget maintained its N110 billion mark, while the National Assembly added N3 billion to make its budget stand at N128 billion for the 2019 fiscal year.
For the 2020 fiscal year, N14,380,258,675 was added to the budget of the Presidency to bring it to N65,593,425,297, comprising of N46,562,367,372 as recurrent and N19,013,057,925 as capital vote. As it were, the increment to the 2020 budget of the Presidency was mostly on recurrent expenditure.
The Judiciary maintained it’s cap of N110 billion, with the National Assembly, yet again, maintaining the N3 billion of the previous year to remain at N128 billion for 2020.
In the current proposal before the National Assembly for the 2021 Appropriation Act, the budget of the National Assembly still stands at N128 billion, with the Judiciary’s still capped at N110 billion. But the proposal for the Presidency was to contain a marked increase of N7,325,024,440, coming to a total of N72,918,449,737.
Curiously, the recurrent expenditure of the Presidency continues to rise – from N33,056,842,954 in 2019 to N46,562,367,372 in 2020, and presently to N49,058,552,834 – which means that a total of N16,001,679,880 has been added to the recurrent expenditure profile of the Presidency.
Findings by 365Daily indicate that the only addition to the Presidency’s budget within that period is the Nigerian Financial Intelligent Unit (NFIU) whose budget in 2020 stood at N2,913,215,903.
Conversely, the budget of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) was removed from the budget of the Presidency, yet the lines continues to rise on the graph, leaving many observers to ponder over what, really, is driving the surge in the budget of the Presidency.
For now, the answers continue to fly in the winds.