Budget 2023: Beyond the mutual improvidence 

The federal government’s budget for 2023 conjures a grim picture of the antagonising mutual improvidence of the executive and legislature plaguing Nigeria.

The presidency sent an Appropriation Bill of N20.5 trillion to the National Assembly. The bill came back with N21.8 trillion as the budget for 2023. The president grudgingly signed the bill into law but warned of the consequences of the additional expenditures imposed on the nation by the National Assembly.

The lawmakers raised the budget by N1.3 trillion and implicitly dared the president to veto the bill. Among other things, they added the sum of N30.1 billion as their severance pay. Consequently, as they are finishing their four-year tenure on May 29, 2023, each of them would pick an average of N64, 392, 324 as severance pay.

That is what civil servants collect as gratuity after 35 years of selfless service to the state or federal government. A civil servant retiring on salary grade level 16 collects a paltry N12 to N15 million as gratuity after 35 years of service. A politician in the National Assembly collects five or six times that amount for the part-time service rendered over four short years.

The selfish gesture of the National Assembly is a sad reminder of the cruel action of Lagos State government to its retired workers.

Lagos, the richest state in Nigeria, has since stopped the payment of gratuity to its retired workers on the senseless excuse that it could no longer afford it. All other states in the federation still pay gratuity though retirees have to wait for years to collect it.

Ironically, Lagos still pays retiring governors and even the members of the state house of assembly huge sums as severance packages. Civil servants who toiled for decades with take-home-pays that cannot take them home, are deprived of what politicians with their fat pays collect for doing practically nothing. Someone has to consider litigation as solution to the inhuman treatment meted out to Lagos State retirees. The state government should be sued.

The National Assembly has taken a pound of flesh from Budget 2023 because members know that they hold the presidency in the jugular. The president’s allocation to the National Assembly in the Appropriation Bill he submitted in September 2022 was N169 billion.

The lawmakers hiked it to N228 billion. It boils down to the fact that the budget of 469 lawmakers along with some 2, 000 staff of the National Assembly amounts to N228 billion.  Kogi state budgets N173 billion for its 4, 466, 800, people.

That is a sad reminder of how a cruel income distribution system makes Nigeria the world’s headquarters of poverty. The budget of less than 3, 000 people in the National Assembly is about twice that of four million people in impoverished Kogi State. Budget 2023 would simply escalate poverty.

The National Assembly is bold enough to hike the budget arbitrarily because members know that the executive is guilty of similar improvidence.

The president is begging the lawmakers to give legal backing to the N23 trillion raised from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) through ways and means funding of government expenditures.

The CBN was just printing money for government without backing it up with productivity. That has been partially responsible for Nigeria’s surging inflation.

Now the executive wants the lawmakers to give the mountain of debt from the CBN a measure of legal backing that would enable government convert it to debt instruments and sell to investors.

The irony of the N23 trillion debt is that only the executive knows precisely what the money was used for. No one sought the approval of the National Assembly in the process of raising the debt. Neither did the National Assembly authorise the projects that allegedly consumed the humongous sum. It boils down to borrowing and spending before seeking approval. It is the cheapest way to swindle the people.

The Lawmakers have this fact in mind. That probably explains the decision to brazenly raise the budget by N1.3 trillion without due consultation with the executive.

When the National Assembly gives the legislative backing to the debt conversion plot, Nigeria’s national debt profile would simply balloon to N77 trillion.

Budget 2023 is another consumption budget designed for the comfort of politicians and top civil servants. Everything in it is meant to swindle the toiling masses. The budget is predicated upon economic indices that are already falling apart.

The naira was already trading officially at something close to N460 to the dollar weeks before the bill was signed into law. Pundits are looking at an official exchange rate in the range of N500 to the dollar by the middle of the year. Meanwhile, the incurable optimists who drew up the budget built it around a belated exchange rate of N435 to the dollar.

The inflation rate is equally deceptive and light years away from attainable target. Government plans to keep inflation rate at 17 per cent in 2023. Inflation rate leisurely crossed the 21 per cent mark in November 2022. There are fears that it must be sailing perilously close to 23 per cent now. Food inflation is targeting the 25 per cent mark.

Those who planned the budget are either men from the red planet, Mars who know nothing about developments in Nigerian markets or they are incurably dubious and poised to mislead economy operators in the private sector into planning with fake indices.

The truth is that no one in the private sector is being deceived by the unattainable economic indices. They all know the truth and have since found their way out of the blind alley of the budget planners.

The private sector plans with the parallel market exchange rate, which, though slightly exaggerated, paints a clearer picture of the purchasing power of the naira.

Some corporate bodies plan with inflation rate of 30 per cent because of the trend in the foreign exchange market which dictates the inflation rate in an import-dependent economy like Nigeria.