By Nnamdi Elekwachi
BudgIT, an accountability-focused, civil society group, recently alleged that 11,122 new items (extra to the initial provisions) totalling ₦6.9 trillion were inserted in the 2025 budget by the National Assembly; a practice known in the Nigerian parlance as ‘padding’. There has been no word from the presidency, only insufficient denial from the National Assembly so far.
Initially, President Tinubu proposed the sum of ₦49.7 trillion for the 2025 fiscal year, but the National Assembly, following concurrence of its two chambers, arrived at the amended sum of ₦55.99 trillion. Nigeria is indeed a country of contrasts. Sadly, this is the act our ‘distinguished’ and ‘honourable’ lawmakers indulge in when they tell us the budget is under ‘scrutiny’ after presentation of the proposed budget at the National Assembly by the president.
The law allows lawmakers to review and amend our budgets. By contrast, the budget review window in Nigeria is now ample time for padding! Only last year, Senator Ningi alerted the world to the existence of two budgets in one fiscal year, one being the real appropriation law enacted by the lawmakers (₦25 trillion), the other (₦28.7 trillion), being implemented by the federal government, but ‘alien’ to the National Assembly. Although Ningi nearly capitulated under the weight of threat, his allegation points to lack of fiscal discipline in the National Assembly.
Budgets don’t just happen. Designing a budget requires that certain aggregations and adjustments be made. In the case of Nigeria which operates a multi-year budget system, these adjustments are done relying on the medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF), fiscal strategy paper (FSP), and the Finance Act, which are macroeconomic indicators, to design a budget template. Amending (read padding) the budget the way our lawmakers do will affect fiscal planning. Padding itself is not planning.
Budgets themselves have phases and stages they go through before they become operational; beginning from planning, approval, execution, and then evaluation. It is at the approval stage that the National Assembly exercises the fiscal recklessness that is ‘padding’. Oversight, which is a legislative function, has become a suitable occasion for ‘padding’ as well!
Since budgets require a stamp of their authority to become a law (Appropriation Act), federal lawmakers, who want to advance their political ambitions or gain political popularity in their constituencies, often smuggle additional items in the form of projects into the appropriation thereby bloating budgetary numbers. And since it is hard accessing funds directly like the executive, lawmakers ‘play ball’ with intervention agencies like the NDDC and others. This way, the budgetary allocations of these intervention agencies are bloated, and in appreciation the agencies will agree to build roads, sink boreholes, or fix infrastructure in the senatorial zones and federal constituencies of lawmakers who facilitate the expansion of their budgets. This is how lawmakers ‘attract projects’ to their constituencies, but in practice it is like what Nigerians call ‘scratch my back I scratch your back.’
Budgets, sometimes, are padded in order to simply allocate more funds to certain government owned enterprises (GOEs) who may need more funds than what the Federal Government, through the ministry of finance or relevant authority, allocated them in the budget cycle. We may have to interrogate what happens at the committee level during budget defence to know whether we have accountability or finalising of ‘deals.’ Just like ‘attracting projects,’ budget defence could be a national drama corruptly staged to favour concerned MDAs and the National Assembly rather than the public.
What is more, in most cases some items are captured as first line charge or statutory transfer under opaque headings. This is where part of the funding for the National Assembly is captured. There is service wide vote (SWV) too, a flexible budgetary allocation that could be drawn in unforeseen circumstances. These are items the National Assembly leverages to increase spending in its budget which is hardly subject to a review, and which also is hardly audited.
It remains a fact that budget padding, considering the romance between the MDAs and the National Assembly, is a leviathan that may never be defeated in Nigeria. It is sometimes through padding that the National Assembly receives its ‘tokens’ and ‘prayers!’
But the disturbing thing here is that budget padding pushes Nigeria to the fiscal cliff. Under the current republic, Nigeria has never operated a surplus budget. It has always been deficit, leaving the nation with a borrowing need, to source loans either domestically or externally to execute budgets. The National Assembly itself knows that this fiscal recklessness known as padding may force the nation to borrow more thereby adding to the existing deficit and increasing the public debt profile, but the same National Assembly will never exercise fiscal restraint. The National Assembly too is aware that Nigeria’s fiscal space is shrinking, but will prefer to support borrowing at the expense of fiscal prudence just to help the executive achieve its spending plans.
To end this, the National Assembly must be subjected to internal and public scrutiny under a system of checks and balances. Their bank finances MUST be audited. Our fiscal laws need to be expanded to clearly stipulate what the role of the legislative arm of government should be in fiscal matters. Not subjecting the National Assembly to checks is the reason they sometimes operate outside their environment. I also think that budget defence, which is done annually, should be done quarterly to allow lawmakers to evaluate quarterly reporting periods and also to expand the frontiers of oversight. This will put in place an adequate monitoring and evaluation mechanism that reduces fiscal recklessness.
In the Tenth Assembly, like other assemblies before, we have men and women who prefer making money to making laws, it is only unfortunate that ‘padding’ is the moneymaking avenue.
Nnamdi Elekwachi, a public affairs analyst wrote from Umuahia, Abia State.
