BY SEGN ADEOSUN
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, President Muhammadu Buhari will sign the 2018 appropriation bill into law at the State House on Wednesday, June 20, at 12 noon.
Mr. Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, confirmed this to The Crest on Monday, debunking the notion that this week’s Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting had been cancelled because of the event.
“Yes, I confirm that Mr. President will sign the 2018 Appropriation Bill into law at 12 noon on Wednesday,” he told The Crest. “FEC was not cancelled for the event. Remember Friday and Monday were declared public holidays for the Eid al-Fitri celebration. And those days are the days the Secretary to the Government of the Federation prepares Council papers. That’s what happened.”
Eid al-Fitri is a very important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
The Crest recalls that Adesina had told State House Correspondents, after last week’s FEC meeting, that the President will append his signature to the document this week. But the Special Adviser neither gave any specific date nor time.
The President had submitted the 2018 Appropriation Bill to the National Assembly since November 2017. He had proposed a budget of N8.612 trillion, pleading with the lawmakers to expedite action on it and pass it on time. Indeed, many in government had hoped that the budget would be passed before the year becomes history.
Nigerians, too, had expected that with the President’s plea, the nation might be breaking finally away from the tradition of long delays in budget processing.
That hope hit the rocks with altercations between the Presidency and the National Assembly over adjustments in the figures, an action analysts commonly refer to as ‘budget padding’.
On its part, the National Assembly passed the buck to ministries, parastatals and other agencies of government for holding back on the breakdown of their proposals.
It became a ding-dong at some point with some executives of agencies insinuating that the lawmakers actually wanted their palms greased before doing the job tax payers pay them to do.
Finally, on May 25, 2018, precisely six months after, the Presidency confirmed it had received the appropriation bill after having been passed by the congress.
Still, the National Assembly increased the proposal by N508billion bringing the total to N9.12 trillion from the original estimate of N8.6 trillion.
With five months to the submission of President Buhari’s last budget, it stands to be seen how much of the newly passed budget would be implemented. This is because, even after signing the document into law on Wednesday, the battle ground will shift to the Ministry of Finance for cash backing.
Cash backing has been a serious issue since the beginning of the Buhari Administration, with Ministry of Finance not readily releasing money to Ministries, Departments and agencies. And financial analysts have fingered this to be responsible for the slow pace of progress recorded in some critical sectors.
To accelerate the pace, therefore, most them have advocated a redress of the bureaucratic bottlenecks often experienced at the Ministry of Finance.
On the other hand, they also tried to absolve the Ministry of blame going by past experiences where Ministers, heads of agencies and parastatals had turned their allocations to bazars, resulting in monumental corruption.
