Opinion: 2017 State House budget analysis - by Saatah Nubari

This is a very illuminating analysis of the 2017 Federal Budget of Nigeria recently presented to the National Assembly by President Mohammed Buhari. Alliance for Integrity in Governance endorses it. This was first published in YNaijaDotCom - The internet Newspaper for Young Nigerians. Read and think!

Part 1

The first time this budget analysis series ran was for the 2016 budget; and it becomes visible each day that the 1810 page document was a horrid, hurriedly-put, corrupt-conduit-filled piece of executive cluelessness. Well, since I’m more of a realist than any of the other-ists, I’ll just say that the fact that the world lost an entire tree to the making of the paper it was inked on is a tragedy. We have been given a sequel; the 2017 budget was presented to the National Assembly by the President in the presence of the ministers who drafted it—and even slept while the presentation was on—and it was called the “Budget of Recovery and Growth.” If you noticed, it is quite a change from the previous budget of change just like the government’s change mantra. Here are some quotes from the President’s speech on what when passed, will be arguably the most important document in the country—sorry, just checked and it is 63 paragraphs long so I will just skip to analysing the 2017 budget as we await the implementation report of the 2016 budget.

The 2017 budget is N7.298 trillion. According to the government, this comprises of

419. Statutory transfers of N419.02 billion;
420. Debt service of N1.66 trillion;

iii. Sinking fund of N177.46 billion to retire certain maturing bonds;

2. Non-debt recurrent expenditure of N2.98 trillion; and
3. Capital expenditure of N2.24 trillion (including capital in Statutory Transfers).

We will begin with the State House budget, which is, 42,917,666,214. This almost double what the previous government budgeted for this in 2015 which was 23,465,865,117. Out of this, 19,970,000,000 is the total capital budget while the total recurrent budget stands at 22,947,666,214. The total overhead is 10,171,082,268 and that for total personnel is 12,776,583,946.

This is the first piece in the #SaatahBudgetSeries2017, and I will be looking at the budget of the State House (which was referred to as Presidency in previous budgets).

STATE HOUSE

There are 16 agencies under the State House, and they are: State House Headquarters, The Office of the President, The Office of the Vice President, Office of the Chief of Staff of the President, Office of the Chief Security Officer of the President, State House Medical Centre, State House Lagos Liaison Office, Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS), National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS). Kuru, Bureau of Public Enterprises, National Emergency Management Agency, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Bureau of Public Procurement, Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Nigeria Atomic Energy Commission and its centres, and Office of the Chief Economic Adviser to the President which funny enough the President only appointed in August of this year.

The first piece of shit I was hit with, ironically, was the “Sewage Charges” budget of the State House Headquarters” It was put at 52,827,800. That means 144,733 every day. That’s a lot of shit as far as the eye can see. Compare this with the “Sewage Charge” budget for 2015 which was 4,957,143 and for 2016 which was 6,121,643. This simply means the shit charge went up by 1050% compared with the 2015 budget, and 850% when compared with the 2016 budget. The 52,827,800 question I want to ask now is what exactly are they shitting there?

The State House Headquarters budget for “Honorarium/Sitting Allowance” is 556,592,736. Let me remind you that the previous government budgeted 174,471,371 for the same item in 2015, while in 2016, this administration jacked it up to 507,518, 861.

The State House Headquarters still continues to budget for “Residential Rent.” This is something I have failed to understand up till now and I wouldn’t mind someone explaining it to me. That aside, the amount budgeted for this “Residential Rent” in 2015 was 22,459,575, while in 2016 it was put at 27,735,643. I don’t know how or why, but in the 2017 budget of “Recovery and Growth,” this same “Residential Rent” went up to 77,545,700. Whoever the Landlord of that State House Headquarters is, in this economy, he must be a very lucky and fortunate chap.

There is an 8,539,200 budget for “Anti-Corruption” and I’m perplexed as to what exactly it is.

The last time there was a budget for “Motor Vehicles” or anything like that was in the 2014 budget by the last administration and it was a total of 132,200,000. This government came in in 2016 and somehow concluded that the State House Headquarters did not have enough “Motor Vehicles,” so they started by budgeting 877,015,000 which was something like a 650% increase from the 2014 budget for the same item. The State House Headquarters still doesn’t think there are enough “Motor Vehicles,” so in 2017 they have budgeted a total of 197,000,000 for the purchase of “Motor Vehicles” and “Buses.” At this rate, by 2019, this government would’ve succeeded in buying enough “Motor Vehicles” to drive the entire country off the edge.

2016 will end up being one of the darkest years in this country in relation to power supply. So, I do not understand where the State House Headquarters got megawatts from in 2016 that they have now budgeted 319,625,753 for “Electricity Charge” in 2017. Just so you know, the “Electricity Charge” for 2016 was put at 45,332,433.

The 2016 State House Headquarters budget for the “Rehabilitation/Repairs of Residential Buildings” was 642,568,122, while in 2017, I don’t know, but it looks like an enormous asteroid managed to hit and destroy the residential building at the State House Headquarters because what is budgeted for “Rehabilitation/Repairs of Residential Buildings” happens to be 5,625,752,757.

As usual, knowing that we have travelling President, 739,487,784 has been budgeted for “International Travel & Transport.” Last year only the Vice President budgeted for books. This year neither the President nor his Vice budgeted for it. Apparently, they’re tired of reading.

Just like in last year’s budget, the entire capital budget for the National Emergency Management Agency is for the “Construction of Office Building,” all 374,473,456 of it.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has budgeted 5,999,070,468 for the “Construction/Provision of Office Buildings.” In 2016 they spent 58,434,683 on that. If you do the math, that’s an increase of over 10,000% and qualifies as an economic and financial crime.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission also budgeted 230,536,000 for “Legal Services.”  I don’t know if this is enough, but since they say it is; and as long as none of that amount goes to the case-bumbling, Twitter SAN, Festus Keyamo, no wahala.

In 2016 the EFCC budgeted 93,136,000 for “Motor Vehicles,” but since maybe the corruption they should be fighting has gotten faster, they have upped that to 455,000,000. So if you had a plan of running away from the EFCC, I am sorry, they will have almost half a billion Naira worth of cars to chase you with. It is a car race now you know.

There a line item in the EFCC budget that mentions the “Procurement and Upgrade of Microsoft Product Licences” which 142,237,198 was set aside for. This is as vague as something can get, and when it comes to corruptly enriching yourself, being vague is the best bet.

In 2016 3,260,000 was budgeted by the EFCC for the “Purchase of Photocopiers” while in the 2017 budget 13,755,000 is the magic number.

1,100,595,088 has been budgeted for the “Furnishing of the New Head Office” whose construction cost in the 2016 budget was put at 7,912,502,911. Now, guess what. There is a budget for the “Consultancy of the Head Office Project” and 244,727,624 is budgeted for it. I am sorry; you will have to guess what again. Let me not stress you, 4,583,616,838 is budgeted for the “Completion of Ongoing New Head Office Building Construction” which 7,912,502,911 was budgeted for in 2016, bringing the total to 12,496,119,749. For those of you that numbers scare, that is over twelve billion Naira for the construction of the EFCC new head office. If the budget for the “Furnishing” of the same building is taken into consideration, it becomes almost fourteen billion Naira. That is the anti-corruption model; build a fourteen billion Naira edifice to scare corrupt individuals and firms.

The Bureau of Public Procurement has budgeted 52,957,485 for “Defence Software” and I find myself wondering when they became the Ministry of Defence. But things change, just like this government wants us to believe. I wish them a happy defence.

In the course of going through the 2107 budget, I noticed a significant change. There no longer existed a column to show the state of a project. Previous budgets had the “New” and “Ongoing” tags designated to line items, and it made it easier to understand or rather follow the money. We might not know, but that little omission, which I believe was on purpose, has the ability to make corrupt practices invisible.

The 2017 budget is beginning to look more like a shit-storm, but that shouldn’t be a problem because as you saw from the beginning, they started by budgeting generously for it.

We have come to the end of the first part of my budget analysis; hopefully, the second part will have something better to offer us.

When a sense of shame is lost - Pat Utomi

This article by Prof Pat Utomi was first published in the Punch Newspaper (Online Version) on Thursday December 15, 2016. It is shared for information purposes only.

I am not sure what to say about us, Nigerians. Should I praise the Nigerian spirit for resilience in the face of a misery index those from countries seen as the pits of hell want to get away from? Or, should one castigate the people of the country for acting like zombies as their inchoate economy retrenches further, facilities collapse in such a manner that a Nigeria regional manager for South African Airways uses words that suggest our major airports are epidemics waiting to break out? But if truth be told, what puzzles me the most about the Nigerian condition is the total loss of a sense of shame in people who hold positions of public authority in Nigeria. Their swagger in the face of South bound reality beggars belief.

A few years ago, I encountered the motto of a secondary school I fell totally in love with. But now I am wondering if the last line should not be doctored a bit. The motto urges students to work hard and play hard for

                 “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost

                   When health is lost, something is lost

                   When character is lost, all is lost.”

But I feel that extant experience suggests that when a sense of shame is lost, all is lost. Maybe, a fourth line should be when shame is lost nothing can be salvaged.

There is hunger and anger in the land. In some, desperation and despair stand up in a sharp relief. But you would not guess that when the Excellencies cruise past in long motorcades that drain the public treasury. How did we get this way?

I have struggled to understand how societies fail, in human history.  This is why I have found efforts of people like Jared Diamond to offer explanation, in Collapse, for example, quite intriguing. Given the place of my birth, it should not be a surprise that my biggest challenge has been Nigeria’s failure to make progress and the bigger tragedy of the phenomenon I have come to identify as progressive degeneration where, save a few examples, governments have been progressively worse, suggesting that learning is a problematic idea. That grabs my attention as a teacher, especially one who has done some work on organisational learning and know that unless the rate of learning in an organisation is equal to, or greater than the pace of change in the environment, Rewan’s axiom, the organisation is dinosaur-status bound.

The logic suggests that with climbing the learning curve and getting a return on Experience, those that follow should do better than the ones who bore the costs of errors not foreseen. But not so in the Nigerian experience. Compare governance and governing in Nigeria before 1975, with today.

Imagine current realities. The economy is inchoate and reeling from largely self-inflicted errors; the power sector is in disarray and manages to aggravate the misery index in ways difficult to describe to anyone who has never lived in Nigeria. The aviation sector is a pain merchant causing people hardships that make the fear of travel the beginning of wisdom. The roads as alternative means are not much to look to. After a recent road journey from Benin to Abuja, my body was clearly calling for medical help but I was afraid that to reach a doctor may result in iatrogenic intervention where the medicine could do more damage than the disease, evidently the case with policy and problems in the country. Elections have become wars and public office holders consume resources for infrastructure and growth, in the enjoyment of the perquisites of power.

All these may bring the normal to the brink of tears but they do not trouble me as much as the fact that those on whose watch a country is crumbling walk with such swagger you feel you have just left the requiem for a sense of shame. If shame has not been buried in Nigeria, all of us should be acutely worried that the state of things is the moral equivalence of war. Nations at war mobilise all available resources, define clear strategies. Few know which direction we are travelling and even many inside privately plead they are outsiders in government.

What is holding Nigeria back from doing what is right for the next generation to know progress? After much ponder, I am convinced the problem is culture; in particular, the culture of the dominant political actors in Nigerian history. Nigeria has suffered state capture since 1966 and the group of soldiers who ceased the Nigerian state that year, retain a firm grip 50 years after, even if crisis of legitimacy forced them from time to time to install fillers like the Shehu Shagari, Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan stop-gaps.

Culture matters. Long before the Harvard Colloquium on How Values Shape Human Progress, I was certain that culture had great consequences for progress. While people like the Peruvian economist, Hernando De Soto, down play culture in arguing that institutions are central to how man makes progress, my own Growth Drivers Framework, draws both, and a few other variables, into explaining why some countries are poor while their peers thrive.

So, the question remains, why did Nigeria stall when less favoured Asian counterparts surged forward in the 1980s? The so-called Resource Curse study at the World Bank in the mid-90s domiciled the problem with oil, to an extent, if you extrapolate. Then, oil boomed again in the first decade of the 21 century and oil producing Arabs like Qatar, UAE, and others developed dramatically. Again, Nigeria stalled. In my view, the class of 1966 cannot help itself. It was socialised into a view of triumph as the Hunt. The hunter mindset is kill and share, divide and rule. Nation-builders on the other hand, as farmers sow and water. They gather together those around so the pool of labour will make harvest easy. The class of 1966 is a class of hunters so that even though part of their entitlement mindset is that they fought a Civil War to unite Nigeria, the reality is that the nature of their hunter orientation manifests in conduct that has done more to disunite Nigeria than enemies of Nigeria could do if they desired its breakup. Because of their booty, war treasure, view of how they see government, the class of 66 sees all who suggest a different way to make the country move forward as scavengers looking for a piece of this bush meat they have hunted down. They lack the world view that there are people whose only motivation is to be proud of the Green passport they carry. So, they seek to incorporate those who are disposed to bowing before them and despise the independent-minded. They found clones who were governors between 1999 and recently. Those proved to be accelerators of the Nigeria collapse. Nothing better shows that than my fight with them around the need for savings. They squandered oil receipts with nothing to show. But they still swagger today, many still in government.

The culture of the class of 66 drove us, first hesitantly, then with deliberate speed into the crisp of a failing state. But it will be unfair to lay our downfall at the feet of the class of 66 alone. Our failure to speak truth to power, produced a generation that looked away rather than call a spade a spade. We were reduced to a generation that Bob Garrett would describe as “maliciously obedient to patent stupid instructions” from power.

The class of 1966 itself fractures roughly into three groups I label the Moderniser Wannabes; the Narcissistic Influencers and The Entitlement-Minded Praetorian Guard. In their intra-group competition, they sometimes pour out voluble, vengeful and vainglorious, vituperative vilifications; they unleash a vile, venomous, vexatious volume of vicious vendetta that numbs polity and poisons the investment climate. The effect on our political culture has been the gift of a cadre of political actors who care more for protocols, charter flights, presidential fleets, and motorcades than the fact that those they govern are living in conditions of great misery. They betray a failure to understand that leadership is other-centred conduct as self-love defines public choice.

I have never understood how people could sleep, chartering planes with taxpayers’ money, when many of the taxpayers cannot afford more primitive commutes to their places of subsistence eking out of a living. But if you understand the culture of the class of 1966, you will appreciate why it is a time of insensitivity to the plight of the rest of society.  An army of occupation can rationalise things in amazing logic.

I reflected on these ideas for years but as the engaged citizen, I looked for and worked at ways we could mitigate these tendencies. In 2015, the evidence came in fully. The class of 1966 is problematic beyond the “share the Gala, share the booze” mentality. The class of 1966 has crippled the dreams of two generations because entrenched in their culture is the absence of a sense of shame. I doubt that Nigeria will make progress until the eclipse of the class of 1966 is total.

Utomi, political economist and Professor of Entrepreneurship, is founder of the Centre for Values in Leadership