Poor Budgeting, Implementation, Identified as Bane of Development

By

Sola Jacobs

Poor budgeting culture and absence of the best practices in budget preparation, as well as implementation have been identified as the bane of development in Nigeria.

This was the conclusion at the two-day Training and Capacity Building for Local Government officials on Participatory Governance and Citizen engagement, organized by a non-governmental organization, Community Life Project (CLP) also known as Reclaim Naija at Ijebu-Ijesa on Monday.

The leading resource person, Mrs Ngozi Iwere said, poor oversight of the legislature to fulfill its constitutional obligation on the budget and non-inclusion of citizens in budget preparation were some of the indices of poor budgeting and non-implementation in Nigeria.

Delving on the topic, “International Principles in Budgetary Governance, she stated that lack of synergy in budget formulation between governments and their departments, as well as gross imbalance between capital and recurrent expenditure, in favour of recurrent expenditure was a major problem.

Iwere then recommended that budget should be managed within clear, credible and predictable limits for fiscal policy.

She also stated that budget should closely aligned with the medium term strategic priorities of the government, and must promote alignment with multi-year planning and goal setting function of the government.

On accessibility and transparency, the Civil Liberty Organization executive said, the budget documents and data should not only be made available, but it must be clear and factual to state key stages of policy formulation, consideration as well as its debate on implementation and review.

Some of the participants at the workshop agreed that the Nigeria budgetary culture was poor and appropriate mechanism must be adopted to change the trend.

One of the participants, Mr Ojetayo Benson from Ifedayo Local Government commended the effort of Osun State government for engaging  the citizen in participatory government by involving civil servants at  the newly-created Local Council Development Area and Local governments to formulate policies for incoming local government executives.

 

Also Mrs Akinade Motuntayo from Ede North Local Government said, the workshop has sensitized the Community Development officials in the local government in both budget matters and participatory governance.

She added that the workshop had impacted the government officials to put the citizens first in their dealings and considerations.
Another participant, Mr Gideon Odesanmi said, there is need for a change of mindset in the entire polity, for the people to participate in governance, by asking questions from their leaders on how their resource is utilized.