By Felix Ayanruoh
If there’s one Thing most Nigerians can agree on, it’s that this National Assembly has become an ineffective cataclysm, frozen in partisan and egotistic politics and a stumbling block to socioeconomic development. The ongoing friction between the executive and legislative arms of government concerning the 2016 budget otherwise known as the budget of change is very instructive in this regard.
Investigations carried out on the budget imbroglio indicated that apart from the Calabar –Lagos Railway Project, the National Assembly equally expunged other key national infrastructural projects and also drastically reduced the votes earmarked for others. Furthermore,the National Assembly slashed capital votes for Lagos-Ibadan Highway by N24 billion, 2nd Niger Bridge vote by N3.9 billion, Odukpani-Itu-Ikot Ekpene Road vote by N4.3 billion, Benin-Shagamu Road vote by N800 million, Itakpe-Warri Signalling Project by N302.9 million among others.
This yeoman job was carried out by key members of the appropriations committees of both houses and inserted extraneous projects worth billions of Naira to be located within their constituencies under the guise of working on the budget using the platform of Constituency Project.
Constituency Project expenditure are called “pork-barrel spending,” “earmarks,” or simply, “ pork.” These terms refer to the appropriation and redirection of government money toward projects in a representative’s district, often to benefit his supporters. The pork is usually slipped into an unconnected bill as a line item. This allows it to bypass the standard review received by an independent, separate funding request.
Although, pork barrel politics started in the United States, the angle of deleting or reducing earmarks in a budget in favor of pork is alien to global legislative process. Howbeit, pork is an acceptable legislative mechanism, it’s applicability during financial crisis has been held to be economic insanity and a wrong approach to recovery. our country is in a financial crossroad and needs every help to bring it back to sound footing. Pork is not one of those mechanism, rather it is a sabotage to economic development.
Rather than being guided by holistic evaluation of where projects should best be located or who can best undertake them, pork barrel decisions reflect personal interest. Additionally,once a project has gotten started and jobs are at stake, it will be difficult to shut down a white elephant investment.
Heuristic analyses, by experts in the field of budgetary economics such as Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval, and Christopher Malloys of Harvard Business School , are of the view that pork barrel spending causes local businesses to shrink. The more access a state has to pork barrel, the more private companies wither on the vine.
Also, the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste declares, that pork-barrel spending is a form of corruption, where tax dollars are dolled out on the basis of political favoritism and to advance the careers of Washington insiders. The corruption is exacerbated by a lack of transparency and by pressure from powerful lobbyist who represent special interests.
It is instructive to note that pork barrel as a legislative mechanism aren’t vetted by any federal agency in the same way as the vast majority of federal spending. Suffice it to state, that pork barrel politics has been with us over the years, and that it took a budget of change to expose this wicked, destructive and economic killing mechanism, that has been fleecing the nation billions of Naira and meaningful development.
I really think that our elected officials and civil servants should be focused on how to create sustained economic growth, instead of pursuing personal agendas. We should as a nation lend a patriotic hand in passing the budget of change and move our country out of this fiscal conundrum.
Felix Ayanruoh, an Energy Expert/Regulatory Consultant and Managing Partner of a US and Abuja based Law Firm – Ruskat Partners(fayanruoh@yahoo.com)
