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.

Election Spendings of Parties & Contestants

This cycle is gone. The kind of funds being deployed and expended for the 2011 elections is truly mind-boggling by any measure. And you ask yourself, where is all this coming from? Yet, no-one is counting, so, no-one will account. Sad.

In the face of harrowing poverty and unemployment, not to mention decayed infrastructure and absence of electricity, the political class has been truly obscene! The spendings need to tell us the truth: Looting is alive and well, despite EFCC and in spite of ICPC! We mock prudence and decency. Period.

Here is my private thought: Those who lose and those who knew they would lose, where will they recoup from? If what they deployed didn't matter, how did they make the huge pile that produced this "chicken change", then? What is their tax profile? Why are elections so heavily monetized in this country? Who will stop this deviancy?

Since all have sinned and there is no saint in this matter, we pass.

In 2011, there is no capacity or time or incentive for INEC to look this way. Come 2015, we must enforce the law on election expenditure. Must.