FG behind poor budget performance-Adeola

Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts, Mr. Olamilekan Adeola, in this interview with JOHN AMEH, speaks about the rot in the handling of public finances, among other issues

you have chaired the Public Accounts Committee of the House for four years. What are the issues your committee has tackled?

I can say one of the high points of the last four years of my experience as the Chairman, Public Accounts Committee, is the issue of the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation. This is one office I believe that if Nigerians could pay attention to and ensure that we have an office of the AGF that is truly independent and that is backed up with all necessary support, the issue of corruption would be a thing of the past. The establishment of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission and the other agencies would be unnecessary. Because that office has been reduced to the barest minimum by those who are in authority and who ought to have done something to assist that office, this has made that office to lack the necessary bite to fight corruption.

We have, through constitutional amendment, been able to ensure that we have the AGF’s office on the First Line Charge on the Consolidated Revenue, empowering that office to have access to the books and records of the entire 601 agencies of the Federal Government. This is unlike in the past where we had the AGF recommending to these agencies for them to pick one or two firms to carry out their audit exercise. I also bring to the table, the recent issue of missing $20 billion which was put to the public domain by the then Central Bank Governor (Sanusi Lamido Sanusi). If we have an office of the AGF that is properly funded, where we have training and retraining of staff, there would be no need for the Federal Government calling in private firms to carry out a forensic audit on our accounts. The AGF would have taken up this assignment, carried it out and reported back to Nigerians. But because we have a government that is not sincere in fighting corruption, they have decided to make sure that they bring the office to the lowest level that they could so that they could have access to do whatever they want and when there are issues, they call in private firms which they can manipulate to work in their favour. How can we imagine that the capital budget of the office of AGF for the year 2015 was reduced from N1.9 billion to N100 million? Can you also imagine an office of the AGF that has 144 foreign missions to audit and as we speak, between 1999 to date, that office has not audited up to 30 of these foreign missions, while three-quarter of these foreign missions are also revenue generating agencies. So, there is nobody to audit the revenue generated and the expenditure they incur.

Your committee conducted several investigations into the handling of public accounts by MDAs. Isn’t it strange that not much has been heard about your reports?

There are one thousand and one investigations carried out by the committee. We (APC) are not the majority political party; there are a lot of reports of the committee already forwarded to the House for their consideration but when they would not be listed, what do we do? That is the situation even as we are already rounding off the 7th Assembly. Just of recent, we found out that the Service Wide Votes Account, which I tag as a budget in the budget, is a slush fund. It is an account that the Federal Government has been using to siphon money that ordinarily should have been used for the basic needs of Nigerians. I will continue to say this – that a particular aspect of the budget must be cancelled. And I have my reasons. If you go into agencies and parastatals of government today, they will tell you that the last time money was given to them from the capital budget point of view was in the second or the third quarter, while if you go to their overhead expenditure, they would tell you the last time funds were given to them was maybe in the third quarter and these are statutory monies approved by the National Assembly for these agencies to function.

Now, what comes to play is how do we now judge the performance of the budget? If you go into that same budget, look into the Service Wide Vote Account, you would notice that that account performed 100 per cent because it is operated by three main people – the President, the Finance Minister and the Director-General of the Budget Office. These are the three main people that operate the Service Wide Vote Account; ordinarily that particular account performs 100 per cent. And when you look at the budget performance, while the budget of the ministries and parastatals are performing between 40 and 45 per cent and the Service Wide Vote Account performs 100 per cent, by the time you bring 45 per cent and 100 per cent and you average it, you have an average performance of about 70 per cent. That is what they judge as budget performance year in, year out whenever the Minister of Finance is speaking to Nigerians.

On the national budget, questions have been raised over the country’s budgeting process. What’s your view on this?

As I speak to you, there is no flagrant disregard for the Fiscal Responsibility Act because we refer to that law and we stick to it. And one area which would be of interest to us and to the generality of Nigerians is that year in, year out, the President lays before the House what they tag to be the budget of N4.9tn. But I disagree. That is the budget that Nigerians know of but in the true sense of it, the budget of other statutory and extra-ministerial departments put together is about N16tn and so the total overall budget year in, year out is over N20tn. The executive arm operates the budget but nobody is asking questions as to the implementation of the budget; nobody is bringing information on the implementation of the budget; and this is one area Nigerians need to start asking questions in order to move this country forward.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act states among other things, that 80 per cent of the operational surplus must be paid into the consolidated revenue fund. Are you aware that the minister of finance said for administrative conveniences, instead of paying 80 per cent of this operational surplus, she would be paying 25 per cent to the consolidated revenue fund?

What happens to the remaining 75 per cent?

She said it is for administrative convenience and when we have a law, a Fiscal Responsibility Act in place, she will put administrative convenience ahead of the law and work in that regard.