Ben Agande
4 December 2008
The Federal Government yesterday blamed weak human capacity in the nation's civil service as well as the National Assembly's delay in the passage of the 2008 budget for the poor implementation of the 2008.
Speaking on the implementation of the Budget which he put at 'between 40% and 45%' the Minister of Finance, Shamsudeen Usman said the inability of officials in ministries, Departments and Agencies of government to quickly understand the Procurement Act enacted by government contributed to the poor implementation of the budget.
According to him "a number of things contributed to the inability to implement the budget 100 per cent and that is what we are engaging very deeply with the National Assembly to avoid. One of the first things is the delay in getting the budget approved and the ups and downs even after it was approved in April. We went for an amendment, the amendment wasn't approved until, I mean you know the story. So that obviously contributed to the delay in getting the budget implemented."
"The second issue was really the new public procurement act. Some of the MDAs were not very clear about the requirement and it took quite some time for them to be properly enlightened about the new procedure."
"You will recall that under the old act everything had to be approved by the Bureau for Public Procurement (BPP) but the new public procurement act has made it easier in the sense that it is the MDAs that are supposed to set up their own public procurement protocol and follow all the due process mechanism and only get that certified by the BPP. So that took quite some time to understand," he said.
On the 2009 budget, the minister said there was no fear about its performance because some of the problems observed with the 2008 budgets have been plugged.
"Some capacity challenges in terms of MDAs and all of these issues are being addressed. In fact the most important one is the level of engagement that we have had, there were all sorts of comments about the delay in getting the budget but by the admission of many members of the National Assembly, especially those who were involved during the consultation, there had never been any budget the level of consultation and engagement and the depth of it has been as much as it has been in the case of the 2009 budget,"
He however called on the national assembly to hasten work on the 2009 budget in order to actualize the dreams of government for full budget implementation..
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For once, I would agree with Shams, our Minister of Finance that poor human capital is to be blamed for budget delays. I guess our bureaucracy is merely following in the footsteps of our go-slow President and his prevarication. As the adage says - a fish begins to rot from the head down to the tail" However this issue is not applicable to only budget delays but pretty much the entire spectrum of Nigeria's bureaucracy. Guess what is responsible for such poor human capital? Poor educational system in Nigeria which is palpable. One would think that a govt that is… [Read Full Text]