It will not amount to a hasty conclusion to assert that the Nigerian people have not come to realize the place of annual budgets in their lives as the most important policy instrument through which the socio-economic problems facing the country can be addressed.
It will not amount to a hasty conclusion to assert that the Nigerian people have not come to realize the place of annual budgets in their lives as the most important policy instrument through which the socio-economic problems facing the country can be addressed.
If they did, the seeming passive attitude towards the annual budget by the people should have been changed to one where the generality of the masses would clamour for popular participation and open budget. The poor quality governance inherent in our system and lack of exemplary leadership are central to the critical and embarrassing challenges facing the Nigeria nation at 50.
Several scholars from almost every field of human endevour have theorised and pontificated on the problems of Nigeria’s development. Most of them have also made far reaching submissions on the way forward for this widely-acclaimed giant of the black race that still crawls at its golden jubilee.
For record and acknowledgement purposes; I appreciate the works of scholars like Chinua Achebe, Bade Onimode, Eskor Toyo, Claude Ake, Sam Aluko, Pius Okigbo, J.F Ade-Ajayi, Kola Omotoso, R.A. Joseph among others.
They have made seminal presentations and submissions on Nigeria’s troubles and solutions; ranging from issues of exemplary leadership, pre-bendal politics, failure to spend the nation’s resources on projects of genuine high priorities and regenerative investments and the appreciation of national problems through the prism of history which is a rear guard mirror and the inability of leaders to think in sequence and see things in time perspectives. All these prisms seemed right and accurate particularly within the context of the military era, when everyone accepted easily that the exit of the juntas from governance would usher in a new era of responsible leadership and prosperity for the suffering masses.
After over ten years of civil rule, it is very clear to discerning minds that democracy has not been achieved. And that despite our pretence to popular rule in Nigeria, the people have been highly shortchanged by the ruling elites and their cohorts. The politicians and their civil service collaborators have perfected the art and science of cornering the resources of the Nigerian people for sharing annually under the guise of the annual ritual of Appropriation Act and the budgeting process. The international community is aware of this and it constitutes one of the criteria by which the quality of governance and service delivery in Nigeria is gauged. Nigeria is rated too low by the rest of the world due to its annual budget habits and practices.
This piece will bring to light the international ratings and assessment of nations according to their budgets and appropriation practices. This will enable us appreciate where we stand in our efforts to re-engineer our country and improve the quality of life of the ordinary Nigerian.
I will use the International Budget Partnership (IBP), a Washington-based independent organisation which collaborates with civil society groups around the world to use budget analysis and advocacy as a tool to improve effective governance and reduce poverty. The Open Budget Initiative (Initiative); a global research and advocacy programme aims at promoting public access to budget information and the adoption of responsive budget systems. IBP launched the Initiative with the Open Budget Survey—a comprehensive analysis and survey that evaluates whether governments give the public access to budget information and opportunities to participate in the budget process at the national level. The IBP works with civil society partners in 85 countries to collect the data for the Survey. The first Open Budget Survey was released in 2006 and since then the organization has conducted the survey every two years. This effort is aimed at measuring the overall commitment of the countries surveyed to transparency and to allow for comparisons among countries, IBP created the Open Budget Index (OBI) from the Survey. The OBI assigns a score to each country based on the information it makes available to the public throughout the budget process.
The International Budget Partnership considers the
annual budget as a government’s plan for how it is going to use the public’s resources to meet the public’s needs. Transparency in this context means the totality of a country’s people access to information on how much is allocated to different types of spending, what revenues are collected, and how international donor assistance and other public resources are used. The IBP believes that open budgets are empowering; they allow people to be the judge of whether or not their government officials are good stewards of public funds.
Being a biannual project, the survey has been conducted in the 2006, 2008 and 2010.The result of 2010 is yet to be published, however, It will be wise for us to review the result of 2006 and 2008 surveys as we await the outcome of 2010, a year that has also represented a lot of celebrations and spending of public resources for the Golden Jubilee of Nigeria’ independence.
In 2006, Nigeria scored 20% in the Open Budget Index against its contemporary nations like Brazil which had 73%, India 52%, Ghana 42%, South Africa 85% and Botswana 65% .The result of the 2008 Open Budget Survey shows that South Africa has achieved the highest level of transparency and popular participation in the annual budget circle in the world, with 87% score. This means according to the International Budget Partnership that “the government provides the public with extensive information on the central government’s budget and financial activities during the course of the budget year. This gives citizens tools to hold government accountable for its management of the public’s money”.
South Africa was followed by the pacific island nation, New Zealand with 86%.This shows that in the global village, no nation can afford to isolate itself from international best practices. Even in black Africa, Botswana shows a great light and hope for the continent by scoring 62% which is considered as a sign that “government provides the public with substantial information on the central government’s budget and financial activities during the course of the budget year. This gives citizens tools to hold government accountable for its management of the public’s money.”
It is disheartening, however, that Nigeria is living up to its perceived billings by the rest of the world who see it as home to corrupt leaders and politicians who take delight in carting away the resources of their country in foreign lands through opaque fiscal and poor procurement practices.
The IBP rated Nigeria very low with a shameful 19% in the exercise meaning that the Nigerian “government provides the public with scant information on the central government’s budget and financial activities during the course of the budget year. This makes it very difficult for citizens to hold government accountable for its management of the public’s money.” No improvements on the 2006 situations.
This issue remains a sad commentary on our national economic life in the face of collapsed infrastructural base of the country and after the much touted public expenditure reforms and enactment of enabling laws to ensure transparency and value for money in the use of public finance. Nigeria shares this category of a failed fiscal state with Cameroon 5%, Chad 7% and better than Algeria which scored 1%.
It is also painful that poorer African countries like Kenya and Ghana are making efforts and it is showing in their politics and economy and the world is acknowledging these efforts. In this study, Ghana scored 49% and Kenya 57 percent in the Open Budget Index signifying improvements when compared with their showing in 2006. At the point of independence, Nigeria was rated equally among some of the Asian tigers of today like India, Malaysia and Indonesia. In terms of resources, we had some edge over them but the story today is that of arrested development when Nigeria’s corruption and backwardness is contrasted with the giant strides of these emerging nations on the world economic stage. We urgently need to work harder and take ourselves more seriously as a nation, if we are not to fail as a united country as the western world had predicted in a few years time.
Recently, Chukwuma Soludo, a professor of economics and the immediate past governor of Central Bank of Nigeria raised a legitimate alarm on the Nigerian economy. According to him, For Nigeria to take a shot at 2020, the economy needs to be growing at about 14- 15% per annum (more than twice the current rates of 6-7%). Even with improved efficiency, this requires annual investment rates of more than 40% of GDP (higher than total earnings from oil). With the cessation of hostilities in the Niger Delta, and oil price rising to about $79, external reserves ought to be growing. Rather, external reserves are depleting precariously to about $36 billion currently, with weekly sales at the WDAS running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Private capital inflows have largely ceased. The capital market is comatose and capital flight is back with vengeance! With private saving rate of below 20%, public sector dis-saving (borrowing), and huge net capital flight, the numbers on the macro economy do not simply add up. Add to this the surfeit of liquidity and misalignment of basic prices and the conclusion is self evident: sooner or later, something will have to give!
As I ponder the future, I am deeply worried. As a consequence of deliberate choices made by public sector managers and the constitutional/structural bottlenecks, the economy cannot generate the required investment to secure prosperity for all. Today, that effectively means that governments at all levels receive (in Naira terms) about 27% more revenue from oil receipts than would otherwise. Indeed, but for this exchange rate change under this circumstance, there would not be more than 11 state governments that can still pay salaries on a consistent basis. With massive government borrowing during a boom and paradoxically very low levels of public investment, the private sector is stymied into a trap. Who has the strategy to unbind this trap?”
In the light of the above, it is glaring that the strategy that will work is one that will ensure popular participation and faithfulness to the enactment and implementation of the people’s budget and achievement of transparency and accountability; ` the two pillars of good governance. Without fidelity to the cardinal values of transparency and accountability in our public expenditure management, we cannot pull out of a situation where we are considered in the words of Chidi Ibeneche of the Liqiudified Natural Gas Limited as “a desperately poor country.” The Managing Director of LNG backed his claim with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index 2007, which ranked Nigeria 158 out of 182 countries in the world with Human Poverty Index of 36.2, adult illiteracy level of 28 per cent and 37.4 per cent probability of not living beyond 40 years as well as the World Bank estimate to the effect that about 6 million jobseekers enter the unemployment market in Nigeria each year.
One cannot but agree with the above position and that though we may be considered a resource-rich country, our peoples’ poverty cannot be redressed without a new thinking towards the national and state level budgets both by the government and the governed. Government alone cannot guarantee good governance. The people of Nigeria need to embrace budget education and appreciate that the budget instrument is the single most important policy through which our various socio-economic challenges can be addressed; and therefore constitutes too important a document to be left in the hands of those in government alone. As we await the outcome of the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey 2010, we hope that Nigerians will wake up to the challenge of participatory budget advocacy and engagement as a way of addressing the problem of mass poverty, infrastructural decay and corruption.
Ugo Jim-Nwoko is a Development Communications Researcher and a member of the Centre for Social Justice, Plot 17 flat 2 Yaoundé street Wuse zone 6 Abuja.
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