Budgets: Is It Blockade or Bungle?

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.

All Those Court Cases!

Nothing less than 500 court cases or processes ambushed the 2011 general elections! INEC chair had to cry out recently, that the commission was being distracted. It got so bad that courageous judges had to truncate several of those misadventures as abuse of the judicial process/system.

Okay, we have the right to go to court to fight for our rights. But many of these cases are really frivolous and some outrightly ridiculous. It strikes one as though some politicians would rather bring down the nation than lose their election bid! They fight their opponents, they fight their parties, they fight the umpire, they fight their own shadows and think little of patriotism! You just wonder.

After these elections, the Legal System(Bench and Bar plus AG) must work with parliament to tidy things up. It is just too depressing, the extant practice and the mindless abuse.

I rest my case.