By Chinenye Anuforo
BudgIT has decried the masking of several opaque administrative items as capital projects just to shore up the percentage of capital component in the 2018 budget.
Recent analysis by BudgIT shows that approximately N744.48 billion or 42.9 per cent of the N2.65 trillion capital allocations will go into administrative items, which include the procurement of cars, retrofitting of government offices, trainings, consultancies, purchase of furniture and computers and so on.
The report by BudgIT pointed out that “given that the funds marked for capital expenditure would be largely borrowed (as highlighted in the proposed 2018 budget), it is disheartening to discover that most line items therein show a great disconnect from the developmental goals of government as stated in its Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP).
“In a pre-election year, we would have expected that capital projects will be solely devoted to projects with direct developmental impact on the larger population. We have seen several items included in the capital budget that should ordinarily have been excluded given the tight fiscal condition and meagre economic growth. Most of the administrative capital items as shown in our research analysis will benefit less than one per cent of its populace – politicians and civil servants.
“Our scope of developmental capital projects as urgently needed should include the acquisition, upgrading, construction and maintaining of physical assets such as hospitals, schools, roads, railways, power plants, street lights and boreholes, among others. In contrast, administrative capital items are projects that cannot be easily accessed by the general public and have very little or no developmental impact on the population.
“We also notice the fragmentation of capital items as 94.7 per cent of the 9,331 line capital items in the 2018 proposed budget have monetary values below N500 million each. These capital items are accompanied with vague descriptions that will prove difficult to monitor or track in physical and auditing terms.”
However, the report stated that only 26 per cent of capital allocations to the ministries of Health, Education, Agriculture, Transportation, Niger Delta, Water Resources, Science, Works, Power and Housing are trackable, and/or can be directly linked to the written, medium-term aspirations of the government as highlighted in the ERGP.
Across board, a significant amount of capital allocated in the 2018 budget falls under certain generically-named items which have no detailed description and do not communicate the number of beneficiaries of such items. “It is common to find the following entries in the budget of every Ministry, Department and Agency (MDA) of government – welfare packages, sporting activities, drugs and medical supplies, medical expenses, software acquisition, monitoring and evaluation, budget preparation, access to credit, food and agricultural policies, budget preparation and international training, among others.
“This system of budgeting with ‘one-liners’ without details gives room for financial indiscretion and the potential abuse of funds. It is antithetical to what the government continually professes to stand for.
“Most crucial is that the Federal Government is yet to come out plainly on the amounts spent on capital items in the 2016 and 2017 financial years.
While the Ministry of Finance repeatedly claims a sum totalling N1.2 trillion has been released, the Budget Implementation Reports released by the Budget Office of the Federation show otherwise.”