“What we find it not to our liking when a comment is made that tends to say that government will shut down if the National Assembly doesn’t do anything. We do not agree with that”, Senator Abaribe.
The Federal Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, is the second member of the Federal government executive branch to get my sympathy in two days. Regular readers of this page would recollect my welcome article addressed to her when she accepted to return as Finance Minister under Jonathan. I had saluted her courage but also warned that unlike the first time around, when she got Nigeria off the debt trap, by paying too much, this time, there would be no easy victories.
If care is not taken, she might leave the office literally in tears. She was also advised not to start with fuel subsidy removal – otherwise she would lose followers; despite her astonishing credentials and achievements. Unfortunately, she was caught in the maelstrom of events which led to the attempt by the President to raise fuel price from N65 to N141. She used up a lot of her credit on that misadventure. Today, the monument, SURE-P, built on the ashes of that attempt to totally erase “subsidy”, is not enhancing her reputation and may even reduce it further. It is still too early to tell.
One thing which is not in doubt is the need to amend the 2013 Budget proposal in line with the objective realities at the moment. For once, the President and the Finance Minister have my total support. The facts are indisputable. Every budget proposal is based on assumptions about the future which nobody can absolutely predict. Invariably, certain assumptions turn out to be slightly off the mark; occasionally, the roof caves in on a nation as when the tsunami devastated the Japanese nuclear plant supplying power to an entire Prefecture which also happens to be home to three car manufacturers. When unexpected catastrophe occurs, there is no substitute for re-evaluation and perhaps for adjustments to the annual budget.
In the first half of 2013, Nigeria had experienced the worst variance from budget since the Structural Adjustment years of 1986-92. Crude oil exports are down by a higher percentage than in any year in recent memory. Total revenue is down and some of the sector estimates are also off the mark calling for more adjustments. When revenue collections are down by over twenty-five per cent, the Executive branch has one of two choices – it could fail to implement the budget on account of low funds or it could request for an amendment, as it is doing now.
Doing nothing is no option. Time is also not in anybody’s favour; 2013, like other years, will pass into history on December 31. One needs no intelligence or wisdom more than those possessed by a fifteen years old boy or girl to understand the importance and urgency to the nation. That is why the nonchalance with which this matter is being treated by the NASS is so baffling and annoying. They are toying with our lives – all 167 million of us. Would we need an Arab
Spring demonstration to get the NASS to act? One only hopes they have time to watch CNN or BBC.
More annoying are the reasons given for the delay in addressing the amendment. Senator Abaribe’s abbreviated statement was the most responsible out of the ones, on record, out of the many. Even he made a harsh of it when he later said: “there is no way the Senate and indeed, the National Assembly can consider these amendments until we come back from our vacation this year”. Later he also said: “we already have other things that we have to deal with”.
Summed up, the National Assembly amounts to these. First, they are angry that the Minister of Finance told Nigerians that government will run out of money if action is not taken. Then, they grumble that the amendment is longer than the original bill. Finally, they inform us, their employers (i.e Nigerians) that their vacation is more important than the national economic interest.
The answers to their complaints would be rendered in reverse order. When public servants announce that going on leave is more urgent than attending to the public welfare, for which they sought office and were elected, it is better for those who feel that way to resign and go home. Nigerians are not paying them the rumoured astonishing salaries and entitlements only to listen to them complain about overwork. There are hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who will work themselves to death to take home what our lawmakers collect as entitlements.
Second, the complaint about the length of the amendment highlights what is wrong with our polity. One of my friends in Boston in the late 1960s to 1974 was a Congressional aide to late Senator Kennedy. He was only one out of over a dozen full and part-time workers attached to the Senator. Other Senators also employed their own assistants.
The primary function of the assistants was to read the voluminous proposals which every Senator or Congressman received, to summarise them and to prepare options for the lawmakers intervention. To the best of my knowledge, no Senator ever complained about the length of a proposal because he had his assistants employed to plough through them. By contrast, Nigerian NASS members don’t want to spend a farthing out of their huge entitlements to engage the assistants they need. That is not the fault of the President or the Minister of Finance; it is their own individual and collective greed which gave rise to that complaint.
Finally, taking umbrage at the Minister’s revelation that government might grind to a halt in September if urgent steps are not taken amounts to blaming Noah for warning that the flood was coming to wipe the community away. Would they have preferred that she kept quiet until calamity overtook our economy? If she did not say it, as she is being forced to declare, then let somebody else say it. The Nigerian government will almost grind to a halt without a budget amendment which cannot wait until NASS members finish their vacation. Given the little they have achieved in the last two years, many Nigerians can be forgiven for assuming that they were on leave all along.
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