Histrionics, bruised egos, flawed parliamentary mathematics, a besieged presidency and more tantalizing conspiracy theories mesh to hand President Goodluck Jonathan a September deadline to deliver an unlikely 100 per cent implementation of the budget or face impeachment. LOUIS ACHI wades through the maze to decipher a supporting logic or caprice for the lawmakers’ angst.
Twelve odd years on, the emerging consensus is that Nigeria’s Fourth Republic remains a quirky, transitional experiment in democracy. The current face-off between presidency and parliament compellingly dramatizes the state of political progress or lack of it, in the troubled national journey.
From its ‘rebel birth’ and an activist agenda it set for itself, the Seventh House of Representatives comes across as a lawmaking body fired up by a zeal to move the country forward. In successive actions, it reinforced this footing.
But then its trajectory began to wobble following unflattering revelations of the operations of several of its members entrusted with sensitive, nationalistic briefs. Two quick examples are the sleazy Hembegate and Faroukgate. The perceived (mis)handling of the fallouts from these incidents and suspicion of presidential under-hand game incensed the Lower Chamber.
Perhaps, not totally surprising, things came to a head on July 19, when the House debated on the alleged poor implementation of the 2012 Budget by the executive. Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila, a lawmaker of Action Congress of Nigeria extraction had sought an amendment to the motion on the matter and wanted an ultimatum handed to the executive for 100% implementation of the budget by September otherwise President Goodluck Jonathan would face an impeachment proceeding. The amendment failed. There is more.
Conspiracy theories…
Like a low-budget home movie, the drama unfolded. According to some analysts, the threat of impeachment by the House of Representatives is part of the strategy to control the damage that the Farouk Lawan incident has inflicted on the image of the legislature, as an institution. The Reps move was then seen as a gambit to get the presidency and the House together to negotiate mutual reprieve.
In effect, the touted transformational agenda of the House was perceived as totally delinked to the purity of the motive sold by it to Nigerians as the propelling force for the threatened impeachment of the president.
A debatable position, but issues of unhappiness of Reps over the months over the non-payment of their constituency project fund by the government started seeping into the public domain.
Some conspiracy theorists further held that the customary provision of hundreds of millions of naira as constituency project fund to each and every federal legislator by the Federal Government had abruptly been slashed. With the 2012 Appropriation, the presidency, through a persistent fight by the Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, cut it even further down to N20 million per quarter.
In this connection, the legislators were further miffed to no end that seven months into the implementation of the year’s recurrent budget, this sum has not hit their respective bank accounts because the Finance Minister’s insistence that due process must be followed this time in the disbursement.
But the House would have none of these. It stubbornly hinged the impeachment threat on alleged “poor budget performance”, specifically accusing the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, of breaching the 2012 Appropriation Act by withholding capital votes from Ministries, Departments and Agencies. The clearly angry lawmakers claimed that as at July, five months to the end of the fiscal year, the budget had barely performed at 35 per cent.
Only N404bn of the total N 1.5trn capital vote had been released as of June, according to figures confirmed by the House and the minister, although the former observed that cash-backing was about N200bn. It can be recalled that budget performance has been a recurrent raw point in the relationship between the National Assembly and the Executive since 1999.
In the eight years of former President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999 to 2007) for example, both sides constantly disagreed over budget implementation.
For good measure, the embattled lawmakers condemned insinuations that the impeachment threat had to do with their constituency projects or with their desire for contracts and the fight to protect Farouk Lawan, a Rep currently involved a $620,000 bribery scandal.
House spokeman Zakari Mohammed stated that such insinuations were wicked and a ploy to intimidate the lawmakers out of their genuine concern for the nation’s economy. His words, “The 7th Assembly has distanced itself from the Hon. Farouk (Lawan) and (Femi) Otedola case as evident in the bold steps we took in suspending him (Lawan) as chairman of both the committees on fuel subsidy and education in addition to encouraging the law enforcement agencies to do their work according to the dictates of the law.”
But according to public issues analyst Dr. Emmanuel J. Ozah, “Impeaching the President on account of his failure to fully implement the budget is a non-impeachable offence. Nigerians fully understand that the budget is an element of economic planning and national development as well as an instrument for generating economic growth, but full implementation of the budget is not an exclusive responsibility of the President.
To fully implement the budget will require the synergy of the Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government and, indeed, the Bureau of Public Procurement. In addition, the lack of full budget implementation can be traced to inadequate procurement planning and service-level agreements with the MDAs.”
Senate President, Senator David Mark, last week dispelled the anxiety generated by the impeachment threat from the lower chamber of the National Assembly, saying Nigerians should not worry themselves over impeachment.
Speaking with journalists in Umuahia, after declaring open the retreat of Senate Press Corps, Mark said both the Senate and the House of Representatives were working together for the good of the nation.
But the division in the House, particularly among the Peoples Democratic Party’s lawmakers, came to the fore when the Chairman of the Committee on Capital Market, Mr. Ibrahim El-Sudi, said that the threat was the handiwork of the opposition in the lower chamber of the National Assembly. The House spokesman, Mr. Zakari Mohammed, in an interview faulted El-Sudi, saying he was merely expressing his personal opinion. And so the yo-yo goes.
Okonjo-Iweala’s defence
But Dr. Okonjo-Iweala hardly needed anybody to defend her or her budgetary script. She immediately reassured Nigerians that the 2012 budget is being managed in a way that protects and enhances the best interests of the country and stated that transparency and prudence remain the key priorities of the federal government in the management of the 2012 budget.
“Our objective is to achieve both higher budget implementation and better management of the country’s resources”, she declared adding that, “We will not toy with public resources because they belong to all Nigerians”.
Swiveling to what appears the bone of contention, the implementation of the capital budget, she set out some of the key milestones of the 2012 budget.
• Total capital budget for 2012: N1.3 trillion
• Releases so far: N404 billion
• Cash backed portion of the capital budget: N324 billion
• Percentage of cash backed portion that has been utilised: 56%
She explained that the improvement in implementation ratio from 39.2% by the end of May to 56% utilisation of cash backed resources by June 20 was made possible by the direct leadership of President Goodluck Jonathan who is personally leading the drive for better budget performance.
Expressing confidence that the there will be further improvement in the level of implementation before the end of the year, she stressed that to maximise results, the ministry was being careful and methodical in releasing funds to MDAs. For good measure, she reiterated that the Federal Ministry of Finance is not holding any budgeted funds back and that more releases of funds will be made in the near future.
She was to calmly tell the senate that, “I think the point is that Mr. President is determined to implement this budget as fully as possible and therefore we will be moving towards the figure of as full implementation as we can by the end of the year because the budget was made for the whole year.”
According to her, “In terms of 100% implementation, I think that what I read that was said by sections of the National Assembly, will have to do 100% implementation of the budget by September. First, in my experience worldwide, there is hardly any country where you would implement 100% even by the end of the year and this is based on very broad experience,” stating that the usual expectation is that implementation would be in the 80% to 90% range, not 100%.
By September, you know September is the ninth month of the year, so we will definitely be moving towards the figure,” she said, noting that funds for the Third Quarter would be released within the next two weeks.
She pleaded that there is neither lack of effort nor of goodwill. “If we could go from 39% in May to 56% by mid-July, that shows a considerable leap and I’m quite confident that as we go month by month both us and the National Assembly will be able to look at it and say yes a good effort has been made for the country.”