» "Top Civil Servants May Be Fired For Sabotaging President Buhari’s Budget" «

Budget Scandal: Top Civil Servants May Be Fired For
Sabotaging President Buhari’s Budget
FEB 06, 2016
SaharaReporters has learned that the Muhammadu Buhari
administration was 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.”