Opinions

Of budget and separation of powers

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari, on Wednesday, pulled A usual tactic while signing the 2018 budget into law. In his speech while assenting to the budget, he took a huge jibe at the National Assembly, accusing it of tampering with the 2018 budget by cutting essential projects and inserting non-essential ones. He claimed up to 6,403 projects initiated by the lawmakers were inserted into the budget. The president further alleged that the lawmakers removed some priority projects of the federal government, replacing with theirs. He also accused them of sabotaging the executive’s effort of regularising the country’s budget on a January-December financial year. This recent diatribe of the president didn’t come as a surprise, but what is surprising is the attempt to distort facts, twist reality and incite the public against the legislative arm of government through claims that the NASS had removed priority projects.

We may not like the faces of the men presently occupying the NASS, but that doesn’t take away the fact that the National Assembly is an independent arm of government with spelt out duties and responsibilities. It also does not mean we should throw caution into thin air by denigrating an arm of government all in an attempt to look good to the public. No! Such practise spells doom for the nation’s democracy. It is necessary to set the record straight in the face of Buhari’s allegation which at best could be described as an appeal to public opinion and on the other hand a well orchestrated attempt to incite the public against NASS. This is the point where we may be forced to ask a pertinent and germane question, does the NASS have the power to tamper with the nation’s budget presented by the executive? It is an affirmative Yes.

The process of preparing the budget to become an Appropriation Bill is a shared responsibility between the executive and legislative arms of government. No arm has a monopoly over the budget, monopolising what goes into the budget and expecting the budget to come out, fully approved, the same way it had gone into the National Assembly, without probing, subtraction and addition where necessary, will render useless, null and void, the principle of checks and balances running at par with the theory of separation of power as postulated by French Philosopher Baron De Montesque. The National Assembly will be doing a great disservice to the nation and the people they swore oaths to represent if they fail to check assiduously, the expenditures proposed by the Federal Government, any legislature which does that is called a rubber stamp legislature.

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The constitution is explicit; the President’s role in preparing the budget is to send budget estimates to the NASS, while the NASS in its own capacity is empowered to, where necessary; allocate, re-allocate, remove, add, increase, reduce or retain revenue and expenditure heads. Meanwhile, if the president feels due diligence had not been done to the approved budget by the NASS, he has the power not to append his signature and he could also return the budget to the NASS stating his dissatisfaction with what the NASS has approved. But Buhari failed to explore any of the options availablle to him, rather he decided to prey on the naivety of the masses, appealed to their emotions in order to sway public sympathy and incite the public against the NASS. Such cards are old-fashioned. It is very clear that the executive, through Buhari’s speech, sees itself as the alpha and omega of the nation’s budget and whatever it puts in the budget must be binding. That is not what democracy is about. The constitution empowers the legislature to scrutinise, add or remove anything they believe will not serve the interest of the larger populace from a law, the budget is a law. The NASS has judiciously exercised its constituionally empowered responsibility.

On the other hand we may want to ask the president to tell Nigerians the level of implementation and success, if any, of previous budgets, just the way he has taken his time to explain to Nigerians what the NASS did to the 2018 budget, he would be doing the nation good by reeling out what his previous budgets have achieved. Aparently what Buhari was expecting was a type of budget passed by a docile and a rubber stamp legislature where the budget comes out the same way it went in, without any scrutinization. Such practice doesn’t work where the legislative arm is active and well grounded in its legislative duties. The NASS has the right to scrutinize, query, apportion, vary and alter the Appropriation Bill as it has right to do so to other Bills. Buhari needs to wake up to the reality of a democratic government, this is not militocracy.