considering firing several top civil servants who acted in various ways to
sabotage or undermine the government’s efforts to produce budget proposals
that reflected financial prudence and frugality. Two top administration sources told our
correspondent that “bureaucratic resistance and entrenched systemic corrupt practices
dogged every move by the Presidency during the preparation of the 2016 budget,”
adding that Mr. Buhari had ordered that culpable bureaucrats be identified, fired or
demoted.
One source stated that, after learning that the Presidency was considering a large
budget of possibly N8 trillion in order to significantly increase capital expenditure, some
bureaucrats jacked up the budget proposal to N9.7 trillion for overhead and capital
spending, even without personnel spending. Of the proposed N9.7 trillion, the
bureaucrats had proposed that an alarming N3 trillion be spent on overhead alone, but
the Presidency eventually slashed the figure to N163 billion, lower by 8% than the 2015
budget which was N177 billion. “This indicated that the Buhari administration
significantly cut some of the main provisions,” the source said.
Bureaucrats also proposed to spend N2.1 trillion on personnel for the 2016 estimates
compared to N1.8 trillion in the 2015 budget. However, the Presidency also cut this
down to N1.7 trillion in the final estimates sent to the National Assembly. According to
our source, President Buhari found the bureaucrats’ games infuriating, but decided to
maintain his cool in order to meet the deadline for presentation of the budget in line
with the laws and regulations governing the budget process. “While Mr. President has
always stood for prudence and against waste, the bureaucrats were sneaking in
controversial provisions that clearly didn’t represent the president’s standards and
priorities,” said our source. He added: “Anybody who knows the president would realize
that he could not have approved or endorsed some of the questionable provisions.”
Our sources disclosed that many of the controversial provisions in the budget were
essentially smuggled in by what one of them described as “the budget mafia in the civil
service, made up of people who consider the period of budgeting as their time of
massive opportunity to arrange the stealing of public funds.” The sources assured that
several top civil servants involved in the “resistance” would be fired soon. There has
been fierce public criticism of controversial provisions in the budget. Our investigation
revealed that the bureaucratic opposition began when the Presidency decided to engage
the skills of experts to help in the budgeting process, especially to ensure the adoption
of the zero-based budgeting instead of the “usual envelope and incremental system
used in years past by the federal government.” Zero-based budgeting requires a focus
on need and costs rather than the former system that merely transfers expenses from
previous budgets, but with added upward reviews. One administration official disclosed
that the “old approach, which is mastered by bureaucrats, often leads to several acts of
corruption both by civil servants and political appointees.”
The Presidency had made it clear to officials of the then Budget Office and then
National Planning Commission that it planned to adopt the zero-based budgeting
process. Even so, bureaucrats in the departments, which were merged into the new
Ministry of Budget and National Planning, refused to brief their minister, Udoma Udo
Udoma, on the zero-based budget. “For weeks after the minister was sworn in, the civil
servants continued to plan on the old budget model, stalling the decision to use the
zero-based budget until Mr. Udoma, a former senator, found out from the Presidency.
Our correspondent learned that the bureaucratic stalling led to a huge waste of valuable
time, with the civil servants calculating that the Presidency would be forced to abandon
the zero-based budget once time was running out. However, by early December, Mr.
Udoma and the Presidency regrouped the budget planning efforts around the zero-
based budget. An expert who was brought in to facilitate the new process told our
correspondent that some bureaucrats still found ways to sabotage the process. “They
took longer than required to come back with revisions to their estimates. In the
process, many of the provisions already marked down for revision simply got snuck in,
effectively pushing the
Presidency into the defensive in the face of public backlash,” he said. A presidential
aide added that many provisions that have drawn the ire of the public managed to sail
through the budget, which has more than 6,000 items in all, “because some of the civil
servants who were meant to supervise the final product were also hostile to the zero-
based process. So their uncooperative attitude just compounded the problem.”
The source, who assured that the embarrassing problems would never crop up in future
budgets, pointed to an example where Bureau of Public Procurement, the agency of
government responsible for maintaining a price reference list, could not provide an
updated list. “The list should be updated quarterly, but the bureau “maintained a list
prepared in 2013,” said the source.
The source added, “Some people were so bent on exploiting the system that the time
was simply not sufficient to stop them. But since the budget is only an estimate, the
implementation part now offers the Presidency the opportunity to tame the corrupt
intentions and practices.” According to an expert who helped in the budget planning,
“We were virtually doing vigils to beat the time since the budget had to be presented
before the end of the year to the National Assembly. And while some of the civil
servants eventually cooperated, those who were resistant caused the insertions of many
of the provisions that are now embarrassing the government.” On the duplications that
were rife in the budget proposals, the expert explained that it was “due to the difficulty
experienced by the software that had been in use for planning the budget in the past.
That software does not easily accommodate the zero-based budget template.”
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