Dear PMB, What Is Going on with the Budget?

We are in the third month of 2016. However, Nigeria still does not have a 2016 budget. This is not for lack of effort, but in true Nigerian fashion, the people responsible have messed it all up. There was the entire debacle about the actual documents being lost. In this day and age of emails, flash drives and clouds, where information can be stored forever, it seems, Nigerians managed to lose hard copies of the such an important document. When the missing budget was finally found, it appeared that someone somewhere had made ridiculous errors. Some figures were typed twice, some were missing completely and other funds were just misallocated. Trust Nigerians to find a way to mess everything up. So what does this mean? It means that a plan that was supposed to dictate the actions of the government for the entire year of 2016 has still not been passed at the beginning of the third month. That means our country is running about like a headless chicken just before Christmas.

Nigerians anxiously waited for Buhari and his team to come out with the budget for 2016, just like they waited for him to announce his cabinet. Finally, in December 2015, he announced a 6 trillion naira budget. All that remained was for it to get passed. It’s that simple, isn’t it? But not simple enough for Nigerians, no, we like to do things our own way. 2016 came, and many celebrated the New Year with family and friends. Maybe one of the members of parliament used the lost copies to pack jollof rice and gizdodo for guests. Because when it was time for the parliament to start considering the budget, all of a sudden, it vanished. Several copies of the budget disappeared and this ended up delaying proceedings. What other country apart from Nigeria can you imagine that happening in? But we allow such, because our country is where the bizarre becomes the norm.

As if losing copies of the budget wasn’t enough, the Buhari administration decided they weren’t done mucking around. They must have thought, “Losing the budget wasn’t a big enough mess up, let’s do bigger.” The budget in itself was not done properly. People sniffing about were about to smell something fishy. Apparently, an initial budget was passed and then some oga at the top decided to add small on top, like when you’re measuring rice and you add small on top of the cup. Once that was discovered, the entire budget was scrutinized. Some of the figures were ridiculous. 3.8 billion naira was allocated to the State Medical Center while only 2.7 billion naira was allocated to the construction of hospitals across the entire country. The office of the Vice President was allocated 5 billion naira to buy books. Book for 5 billion naira! It wasn’t too long before everyone washed their hands off this suspicious document. The Minister of Health basically said that wasn’t what was submitted to be part of the budget. Someone somewhere had ‘touched’ it. Obviously, someone’s head was figuratively lopped off to pay for this embarassment. The Budget Chief, Yahaya Gusau was sacked. Buhari has called the entire debacle “embarrassing and disappointing” and said the ones responsible would not go unpunished. Right now, the budget is being reworked on and everyone involved has a grimace on their face. This is not how governments should work.

There is no reason why this budget should be taking this long. Obama submitted his 2017 budget six months before it was due to be implemented (October 2016) so that there would be time for it to get worked on and passed. That’s how it should work. We shouldn’t be cutting it close. As a country, we need to be more efficient in everything we do. Starting with being efficient in deciding in what we are going to be efficient in.