Cosmas Ekpunobi
5 November 2009
Tempers rose on the floor of the Senate yesterday, as the Upper House took stock of the 2009 budget insisting that it was another jamboree under President Umaru Yar'Adua.
Senate at the end of a meeting with the Minister of Finance, Mallam Mansur Murktar, put the performance of the 2009 budget at between 15 and 35 per cent.
But spokesman of the Senate, Ayogu Eze at a news briefing, however confirmed that the President had agreed to present the 2010 budget to a joint session of the National Assembly on November 19.
He said the budget performance of about 15 and 35 per cent was not acceptable to the Senate even as he blamed civil servants whom he said lack the capacity to understand the budget for the failure.
He said both the Senate and the minister were not satisfied with the performance of the 2009 budget adding that such failure was largely responsible for the lack of infrastructure in the land.
He said: "About 1pm today or thereabout we shut our doors to discuss with the minister of finance and his team. We discussed a number of crucial issues, chief among them, number one, the government is going to bring a supplementary appropriation and the government is also bringing a request for virement because certain crucial projects had to be attended to in the light of certain developments, one of them being the amnesty and the necessity to consolidate the gains of amnesty in the Niger Delta region with certain projects and contracts and the one on issues that are likely to inform what will determine the final shape of the 2010 budget. We also took him up on issues of the performance of the 2009 appropriation and the performance of other appropriations down the years.
"The Senate is not satisfied with budget performance, and neither is the minister satisfied with the budget performance because in some places the performance is as low as 15 per cent, in some places 27 per cent and in some places 30 per cent.
On the reasons for the failure of the budget, he said: "A lot of reasons came up, some of them from senators and some from the minister. All of us are agreed on one thing that the problem is with the civil servants and the political heads that are supervising them.
"There is absence of capacities in the MDAs to implement budgets or appropriations that they asked for every year. This is one thing that came through and it as the suggestion of our colleagues that they should organise some form of retreat or workshop for heads of MDAs and their subordinates so that they can acquire and brush up their skills.
"I must be honest with you, the problem of budget implementation is that the MDAs lack capacity, even the minister agrees to that. In fact I listened to the minister about two days ago that some monies are already sitting in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) released by his office, that MDAs are not able to access the funds and even in some cases certificates have been generated and works have been done to go through the process of generating the necessary papers, the MDAs are not capable.
"One other agency that received lot of knocks from a lot of senators is the due process office; that office has become a due process delay office. It is no longer an office that facilitates the process and award of contracts, it has become, in the opinion of senators, a cog in the administration of contracts," he said.
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