The budget season is here again. It is an institutional and desirable annual ritual. Revenue collection and spending at the federal, State and local government levels must be authorised and guided by law. That is what budget is all about. A document containing the estimates of projected revenues from identified sources and the proposed expenditure for different sectors in the appropriate level of government. The last two weeks have seen the delivery of budget drafts to various Houses of Assembly and the promise that the federal government would present its draft budget to the National Assembly.

Do people still look forward to the budget presentation and the contents therein? I am not sure. Citizens have realised that these days, governments often spend money without reference to the approved budget. A governor can just wake up and direct that a police station be built in a location. With no allocation in the budget, the station will be completed in three months. The President can direct from his bathroom that 72 trailers of maize be distributed to the 36 states as palliatives. No budget provision, and no discussion by relevant committee or group.

We still operate with the military mentality. We operated too long under the military and of the five Presidents we have in this democracy, two of them were retired military Heads of State. Between them, they spent 16 years of 25 years of democratic governance. Hopefully, we are done with them physically but not mentally. Most present governors grew up largely under military regimes with the command system. That is why some see themselves as emperor and act accordingly. Their direct staff and commissioners are “Yes” men and women. There is need for disorientation.

The importance of budget in the art of governance cannot be overemphasized. It is one of the major functions of the legislature because without the consideration and authorisation of spending of funds by this arm of government, the executive has no power to start spending money. There is what we refer to as a budget cycle or stages. The budget drafting stage within the purview of the executive arm is the first stage and, followed by the authorisation stage where the legislature discusses, evaluates and tinkers with the draft for approval before presenting it to the President for his signature.

Thereafter, the budget enters the execution phase or cycle where programmes and projects are executed by the executive arm with the legislature carrying out oversight functions. Finally, we enter the auditing phase when the federal and State Auditors verify and report on the execution of the budgets. The report would normally be submitted to the Legislature. Many Auditor Generals have fallen victim at this stage for daring to query the executives on some aspects of the execution in their reports.

A new budget should contain the objectives and achievements of the preceding budget in the introduction as the foundation for the budget. More appropriately, a current budget derives its strength from a medium-term framework which also derives its strength from a national Development Plan or a State Plan. An approved National Plan does not exist currently, although the Plan launched by the Muhammadu Buhari administration is in the cooler. President Tinubu, who is acclaimed to be the architect of the Lagos State long-term Plan seems curiously, disillusioned with a national Plan.

Some States like Oyo and Kaduna, have long-term Plans that serve as the source of their annual budgets. Economists and policymakers see development plans as instruments of salvation for developing countries. Mike Obadan, the former Director General of the moribund Nigeria Centre for Economic and Management Administration, opined that a Plan in a developing country serves as an instrument to eradicate poverty, achieve high rates of economic growth and promote economic and social development.

The Nigerian development plans were on course until the adoption of the World Bank/IMF-inspired Structural Adjustment Programme in 1986 when the country and others that adopted the programme were forced to abandon such plan for short-term stabilisation policies in the name of a rolling plan. We have been rolling in the mud since that time. One is not surprised that the Tinubu administration is not looking at the Buhari Development Plan since the government is World Bank/IMF compliant. It was in the news last week that our President is an American asset and by extension, Nigeria’s policies must be defined by America which controls the Bretton Woods institutions.

A national Plan allows the citizens to monitor quantitatively, the projects and programmes being executed or to be executed by the government through the budgeting procedure. It is part of the definitive measures of transparency and accountability which most Nigerian governments do not cherish. So, you cannot pin your government down to anything.

Budgets these days hardly contain budget performance in terms of revenue, expenditure and other achievements like several schools, hospitals, small-scale enterprises, etc, that the government got involved in successfully and partially. These are the foundation for a new budget like items brought forward in accounting documents. The new budget should state the new reforms or transformations that would be taking place. Reforms like shifting from dominance of recurrent expenditure to capital expenditure; moving from the provision of basic needs programmes to industrialisation, and from reliance on foreign loans to dependence on domestic fund mobilisation for executing the budget.

That brings us to the issue of budget deficit and borrowing. When an economy is in recession, expansionary fiscal policy is recommended. That is, the government will need to spend more than it receives to pump prime the economy. If this is taken, Nigeria has always had a deficit budget, implying that we are always in economic recession. The fact is that even when we had a surplus in our balance of payment that made it possible to pay off our debts, we still had a deficit budget. We are so used to borrowing at the national level that stopping it will look like the collapse of the Nigerian state. The States have also followed the trend. Ordinarily, since States are largely dependent on the federal government for funds, they should promote balanced budget.

The States are like a schoolboy who depends on his parents for school fees and feeding allowance but goes about borrowing from classmates. Definitely, it is the parents that will surely pay the debt. The debt forgiveness mentality plays a major role in the process. Having enjoyed debt forgiveness in the past, the federal government is always in the credit market and does not caution the State governments in participating in the market. Our Presidents don’t feel ashamed when they are begging for debt forgiveness in international forum where issues on global development are being discussed. Not less than twice I have watched the countenance of some Presidents, even from Africa, while they looked at our president with disdain when issues of debt forgiveness for African countries was raised.

In most cases, the government, both at the federal and state cannot show the product of loans, except those lent by institutions like the World Bank or African Development Bank for specific projects which are monitored by the lending institutions. In other cases, the loans are stolen and transferred abroad while we are paying the loans. In some other cases, the loans are diverted to projects other than what the proposal stated. There was a case of loans obtained based on establishing an international car park in the border of the State but diverted to finance the election of a politician in the State. The politician eventually lost the election but the citizens of the State have to be taxed to pay the loan. Somebody as “Nigeria we hail thee”.

Transformation in budgeting should commence subsequently at the State and federal level. Now that local government will enjoy some financial autonomy and therefore budgeting process, they should be legally barred from contracting foreign loans. They have no business participating in the market. They should promote balanced budget where proposed expenditures must equal the expected revenues from federal and internal sources. The State government that cannot mobilise, from records, up to 40 percent of its total budget from IGR should not be supported to contract foreign loans. The States should engage in a balanced budget. The federal government budget should shift away from huge allocations to recurrent expenditure towards capital expenditure for capital formation and within the context of a welfarist state.

Sheriffdeen A. Tella, Ph.D.

With 32.70 per cent headline inflation, 40.20 per cent food inflation, and bread inflation of 45 per cent, all caused by the removal of subsidies from petrol and electricity, and the government’s policy of allowing market forces to determine the value of the Naira, Nigerians are reeling under high cost of living.

The observation by Obi Alfred Achebe of Onitsha, that “The wellbeing of the people has declined more steeply in the last months,” leads to doubts about the “Renewed Hope” slogan of President Bola Tinubu’s government that is perceived as extravagant, whilst asking Nigerians to be patient and wait for its unfolding economic policies to mature.

It doesn’t look as if it will abate soon, Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power, who seems ready to hike electricity tariffs again, recently argued that the N225 per kilowatt hour of electricity that Discos charge Band A premium customers is lower than the N750 and N950 respective costs of running privately-owned petrol or diesel generators.

While noting that 129 million, or 56 per cent of Nigerians are trapped below poverty line, the World Bank revealed that real per capita Gross Domestic Product, which disregards the service industry component, is yet to recover from the pre-2016 economic depression under the government of Muhammadu Buhari.

This has led many to begin to doubt the government’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund-inspired neo-liberal economic policies that seem to have further impoverished poor Nigerians, practically eliminated the middle class, and is making the rich also cry.

Yet the World Bank, which is not letting up, recently pontificated that “previous domestic policy missteps (based mainly on its own advice) are compounding the shocks of rising inflation (that is) eroding the purchasing power of the people… and this policy is pushing many (citizens) into poverty.”

It zeroes in by asking Nigeria to stay the gruelling course, which Ibukun Omole thinks “is nothing more than a manifesto for exploitation… a blatant attempt to continue the cycle of exploitation… a tool of imperialism, promoting the same policies that have kept Nigeria under the thumb of… neocolonial agenda for decades.”

When Indermilt Gill, Senior Vice President of the World Bank, told the 30th Summit of Nigeria’s Economic Summit Group, in Abuja, Federal Capital Territory, that Nigerians may have to endure the harrowing economic conditions for another 10 to 15 years, attendees murmured but didn’t walk out on him because of Nigerian’s tradition of politeness to guests.

Governor Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State, who agrees with the World Bank that “purchasing power has dwindled,” also thinks that “these (World Bank-inspired) policies, usually handed down by arm-twisting compulsions, are not working.”

What seems to be trending now is the suggestion that because these neo-liberal policies do not seem to be helping the economy and the citizens of Nigeria, at least in the short term, it would be better to think up homegrown solutions to Nigeria’s economic problems.

Late Speaker of America’s House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, is quoted to have quipped that, at the end of the day, “All politics is local.” He may have come to that conclusion after observing that it takes the locals in a community to know what is best for them.

This aphorism must apply to economics, a field of study that is derived from sociology, which is the study of the way of life of a people. Proof of this is in “The Wealth of Nations,” written by Adam Smith, who is regarded as the first scholar of economics.

In his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “The Wealth of Nations,” Andrew Skinner observes: “Adam Smith was undoubtedly the remarkable product of a remarkable age and one whose writing clearly reflects the intellectual, social and economic conditions of the period.”

To drive the point home that Smith’s book was written for his people and his time, Skinner reiterated that “the general ‘philosophy,’ which it contained was so thoroughly in accord with the aspirations and circumstances of his age.”

In a Freudian slip of the Darwinist realities of the Industrial Revolution that birthed individualism, capitalism, and global trade, Smith averred that “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principle in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasures of seeing it.”

And, he let it slip that capitalism is for the advantage of Europe when he confessed that “Europe, by not leaving things at perfect liberty (the so-called Invisible Hand), occasions… inequities,” by “restraining the competition in some trades to a smaller number… increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be… and… free circulation of labour (or expertise) and stocks (goods) both from employment to employment and from place to place!”

Policymakers, who think Bretton Woods institutions will advise policies to replicate the success of the Euro-American economy in Nigeria must be daydreaming. After advising elimination of subsidy, as global best practices that reflect market forces, they failed to suggest that Nigeria’s N70,000 monthly minimum wage, neither reflects the realities of the global marketplace, nor Section 16(2,d) of Nigeria’s Constitution, which suggests a “reasonable national minimum living wage… for all citizens.”

After Alex Sienart, World Bank’s lead economist in Nigeria, pointed out that the wage increase will directly affect the lives of only 4.1 per cent of Nigerians, he suggested that Nigeria needed more productive jobs to reduce poverty. But he neither explained “productive jobs,” nor suggested how to create them.

In admitting past wrong economic policies that the World Bank recommended for Nigeria, its former President, Jim Yong Kim, confessed, “I think the World Bank has to take responsibility for having emphasized hard infrastructure –roads, rails, energy– for a long time…

“There is still the bias that says we will invest in hard infrastructure, and then we grow rich, (and) we will have enough money to invest in health and education. (But) we are now saying that’s the wrong approach, that you’ve got to start investing in your people.”

Kim is a Korean-American physician, health expert, and anthropologist, whose Harvard University and Brown University Ivy League background shapes his decidedly “Pax American” worldview of America’s dominance of the world economy.

Despite his do-gooder posturing, his diagnoses and prescriptions still did not quite address the root cause of Nigeria’s economic woes, nor provide any solutions. They were mere diversions that stopped short of the way forward.

He should have advocated for the massive accumulation of capital and investments in the local production of manufacturing machinery, industrial spare parts, and raw materials—items that are currently imported, weakening Nigeria’s trade balance.

He should have pushed for the completion of Ajaokuta Steel Mill and helped to line up investors with managerial, technical, and financial competence to salvage Nigeria’s electricity sector, whose poor run has been described by Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, President of Africa Development Bank, as “killing Nigerian industries.”

He could have assembled consultants to accelerate the conversion of Nigeria’s commuter vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas and get banks of the metropolitan economies, that hold Nigeria’s foreign reserves in their vaults, to invest their low-interest funds into Nigeria’s agriculture— so that Nigeria will no longer import foodstuffs.

Nigerians need homegrown solutions to their economic woes.