A Presidential aspirant, Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, on Thursday described the lingering accusations and counter-accusations between the Executive and the Legislature over the 2018 Appropriation Bill as nothing but a demonstration of leadership ineptitude in budgetary process.
Moghalu, who recalled the prolonged controversies that had trailed the Bill over the past seven months, pointed out that the blame game smacked of lack of leadership to make the budgetary process efficient and effective in serving the people of Nigeria
In a statement issued by the spokesman of both the Presidential aspirant and To Build A Nation (TBAN) movement, Jide Akintunde, identified the putative “constitutional power of appropriation” claimed by the National Assembly as the root of Buhari’s complaint and urged the executive to lay the controversy to rest by seeking judicial interpretation of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), on the power of the National Assembly to alter the yearly appropriation bill.
Moghalu argued that “if the power is legally valid, then effective collaboration between the executive and the legislature on the yearly budgets becomes imperative.”
He explained further: “The Buhari administration has glossed over this judicial solution to, once and for all, solve the perennial problem of “budget padding.” The administration is instead relying on its trusted propaganda machinery, which entails blaming everyone else but itself and leaving Nigerian people un-served or underserved with fiscal policy.
“The 2018 budget has seen the continuation with the longer-term dislocation of fiscal policy by the Buhari administration. In 2016, Buhari launched a streak of expansionary budgeting, fuelled by excessive debt. From a budget of N4.4 trillion in 2015, the budget rose sharply to N6.06 trillion in 2016, N7.4 trillion in 2017, and N9.12 trillion in 2018.
“On signing the latest budget, the President announced his plan for a supplementary budget in 2018. In just three years, the budget has more than doubled.
“However, the two standout outcomes of the expansionary budgets have been economic recession that is followed by sluggish recovery, and unsustainable public debt. In 2016, the economy contracted by 1.5% (the worst in 25 years) and grew by a meagre 0.8% in 2017”, Moghalu added.
The presidential aspirant of the Young Progressive Party (YPP), also rued the nation’s rising debt profile which increased from N12.1 trillion at the end of June 2015 to N22.7 trillion at the end of March, this year, indicating about 87.6 percent rise.
According to him, at one level this trend-growth makes the public debt unsustainable given the fact that in less than three years, we have utilised perhaps what could be the borrowing limit for a decade.
He pointed out that at another level, the Nigerian national debt today was unsustainable, “because we cannot service it through any period of oil revenue shock without a risky and costly debt restructuring as has already begun under Buhari, at a time that oil prices are at a decent level of above $70 a barrel.”
This is even as the former Deputy Governor of the CBN, pointed out that the cost of debt service as a ratio of government revenue which now hovers around 60% was undesirable as no allocation for capital expenditure is any longer covered by government revenue while capital expenditure allocation is entirely funded by borrowing, even as the country’s debt repayment is also being funded by debt.
Moghalu noted on the budgetary debacle that the Buhari administration had with the 2016 and 2017 budgets spent more than N3 trillion on capital expenditure, describing the expenditure as unprecedented in the history of budgeting in the country.
Noting that the Buhari administration has continued to flash this scorecard to Nigerians, the seasoned banker and development expert pointed out however that the problem was that infrastructure project delivery in the country in these two fiscal years was underwhelming, without any major improvement in the country’s infrastructure stock.
He clarified further: “Therefore, the debt-fuelled expansionary budgets of this administration are doing incalculable damage to the fiscal future of the country. It will impose a hefty debt burden on current young Nigerians in the future.
“We believe that a competent leader with knowledge and character is what Nigeria needs to steer fiscal policy to support sustainable economic growth and development of Nigeria.
“We also believe that the foreign borrowing binge of the Buhari administration must be curtailed as an inevitable part of recreating our country’s future, a future in which Nigerians of the next generations would not be saddled with crippling public debt”, Moghalu canvassed.
