When we ritualized the annual budgets in Nigeria, disconnecting it from the development plan we set the nation up for disaster. And it started with the better-forgotten structural adjustment programme (SAP) - the horrid pill of the IMF/World Bank of yore. What the military regimes and their civilian collaborators didn't chop the SAP Monster sapped! And we reeked and reeled. The rest, as they say, is history - bitter history.
Thanks to President Olusegun Obasanjo's courage and Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala's commitment, we got out of our foreign debt crisis and regained our national pride. It was historic, even euphoric. But, alas, it was short-lived! (PDP, I'm looking at you).
Right from 1999, our political leaders and their collaborators - ably aided by bureaucrats and technocrats - have failed to faithfully and fully implement our annual budgets. Okay let's qualify that: they have selectively and unpatriotically implemented the budgets - routinely consuming all recurrent/overhead votes, ruinously sidelining all capital votes! We've done so year in year out, averaging 30 to 40% budget implementation. (Infrastructure, Education, Unemployment, Poverty, Security, Maternal & Infant Mortality, I'm checking your pulse)
Question: Do we also have a Budget Cabal -at all levels of government - in Nigeria?
Poser: Who is blocking Budget Implementation?
Query: Why are Nigerians not challenging, why are we condoning, this mindless Budget- Bungle?
Puzzle: Is anyone doing the Development Mathematics of these Wasted Trillions?
May 2012 be a bright beginning. Amen.
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