NASS abusing legislative powers, fuelling inefficiency- BudgIT

…says parliament inserts N913.15bn, N910.37bn in 2021, 2022 capital budgets

The industrial action by the parliamentary workers is to press home their demand for full payment of their outstanding 24 months of national minimum wage and other conditions of service.

BudgIT, a civic organisation with focus on making the Nigerian budget and public data more comprehensible and accessible, says the National Assembly is abusing its appropriation powers, fuelling inefficiency and waste.

According to the organisation, the country’s apex legislature inserted an additional N913.15 billion and N910.37 billion for capital projects in the 2021 and 2022 budgets, respectively.

This is contained in a policy memo released by BudgIT on Tuesday and signed by Gabriel Okeowo, the body’s country director and research team comprising; Iniobong Usen, Vahyala Kwaga and Michael Pabiekun.

BudgIT said it analysed the 2021 and 2022 proposed and approved budgets of the Federal Government of Nigeria to ascertain the quality of the National Assembly review of the two years’ federal appropriation bills.

It explained that the review of the annual budget by the National Assembly is one of the most important stages of the budget process, as that is ideally expected to reflect the inputs of citizens in the budget through their elected representatives.

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BudgIT observed that the practice has recently signalled an arbitrary expression of the powers of the purse granted to the National Assembly by the constitution, as legislators perennially flood the budget with vague, frivolous, and constituency-like projects during the process of the annual budget review.

The analysis found that while the 2021 approved budget contained 19,017 capital projects, the proposed budget contained 13,416 projects, signalling that 5,601 capital projects were added to the appropriation bill during a review by the National Assembly.

It observed that the monetary value of the 5,601 inserted projects summed up to N913.15 billion (which is 21.8% of the total capital expenditure for 2021), spread across 32 mother ministries and 327 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of the Federal Government.

BudgIT also observed that, in 2022, and as alluded to by President Muhammadu Buhari during the signing of the year’s appropriation act, 6,462 projects were inserted by the National Assembly across 37 mother ministries and 340 MDAs.

It submitted that cumulatively, the monetary value of the National Assembly insertions in the 2022 Appropriations Act was N910.37bn (which is 22.07% of the total capital expenditure for 2022).

“Critical look at the nature of insertions for the years under review, 2021 and 2022, revealed that the majority of the insertions are projects that ideally should be the responsibilities of sub-national governments (state and local governments).

“Furthermore, despite the fact that the executive had earmarked N100 billion for Zonal Intervention Projects (ZIPs) -also known as constituency projects, nominated by the 365 House of Representative members and 109 senators -BudgIT identified, as part of the insertions, 1,581 “federal constituency” projects in the 2021 Appropriation Act and 1,834 “federal constituency” projects in the 2022 Appropriation Act valued at N105bn and N137.07bn respectively.

“In the same vein, the 2021 Act had 1,055 insertions valued at N103.15 billion, which were projects in senatorial districts, while the 2022 Act had 1,235 insertions valued at N139.26bn, which were projects in senatorial districts.

“The aforementioned is a clear indication that the National Assembly leveraged the appropriation powers granted it by the constitution to exceed the N100bn ZIPs envelope to insert ‘constituency-like’ projects into the 2021 and 2022 Appropriation Acts.

“It is worthy of note that 614 street light projects with a cumulative value of N75.83bn, which were insertions observed in 2021, increased to 902 street light projects in 2022 valued at N114.95bn. Likewise, the construction of civic/town halls and installation of boreholes, which ordinarily should be the duty of local governments, were inserted into the 2021 and 2022 budgets.