ANALYSIS: Budget padding, Ningi’s suspension, constituency projects largesse and burden of truth

By Adeniyi Kabeer On Mar 13, 2024

Budget padding, Abdul Ningi, suspension, constituency projects largesse , truth — aANALYSIS: Budget padding, Ningi's suspension, constituency projects largesse and burden of truth

On Tuesday, the Nigerian Senate suspended Abdul Ningi, the senator representing Bauchi Central Senatorial District for three months over an allegation that the 2024 budget was padded with N3 trillion.

Ningi, who resigned as the Chairperson of the Northern Senators Forum (NSF) immediately after his suspension, recently told BBC Hausa that the lawmakers sought the service of a private auditor and discovered irregularities in the budget.

“For example, we had a budget of N28 trillion but after our thorough checks, we found out that it was a budget of N25 trillion. How and where did we get the additional N3 trillion from, what are we spending it for?” Ningi told the BBC Hausa.

Reacting to this allegation in a point of order, Adeola Olamilekan, senator representing Ogun West said his privilege as chair of the joint Appropriation Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which scrutinised the budget, had been breached as a result of the budget padding allegation levelled against the 10th Assembly.

Olamilekan explained that the Presidency proposed a total of N27.5 trillion budget but after a series of deliberations, the lawmakers agreed to increase the budget to N28.77 trillion which was unanimously approved last December. He said his colleagues resolved to increase the budget with N1.2 trillion due to the request for additional funding for some items of expenditure which were not included in the bill to address issues in Judiciary, Agriculture and Food Security, Works, Science and Technology, Education, Water Resources, National Assembly, Health and National Home-Grown School Feeding Programme.

He added that the benchmark of naira to the dollar was another reason members of the appropriation committee decided to increase the budget with an additional N1.2 trillion. Following this, he called on members of the Senate to take immediate action on the allegation to save the integrity of the Nigerian Senate. While Ningi later denied telling any media organisation that the budget was padded, he insisted that there was an array of repetition of some senatorial districts in the budgetary allocation for constituency projects.

No detailed allocation for N3trn in 2024 budget

In defense, many lawmakers claimed the allegation against the Senate is scandalous and an attempt to incite the public against members of the National Assembly and the Presidency. However, Seun Onigbinde, director and co-founder of BudgIT, says Ningi was right that there was no detailed allocation for N3.7 trillion in the 2024 budget.

Speaking during an interview with Channels Television on Wednesday, Onigbinde said there are “statutory elements” in the budget that do not have a detailed breakdown, adding that Nigerians have the right to know how the money budgeted for the aforementioned bodies are being spent.

“In the current budget, the national assembly gave a very broad summary of its allocations but there are no detailed allocations on a granular level that everybody can interrogate,” he said. “These are transparency issues and if you put all these together, that is around N3.5 trillion to N3.7 trillion. So, if that is what he (Ningi) wants to interrogate, there are components of the budget where there is no breakdown. That is very factual.”

A Civil Rights Advocacy group, HURIWA has described the suspension order slammed on Ningi as a coordinated cover-up and legislative blackmail aimed at smashing the weighty allegations of budget padding raised by the Bauchi State-born lawmaker. The group insisted that the suspension was hasty and will inevitably be interpreted as a ploy by the National Assembly to cover its track.

“The National Assembly that ought to be the bastion of civil democracy is being turned into a secret society since the senators failed to conduct a publicly advertised probe of the damaging allegations made by the Bauchi state born senator Abdul Ningi. The Senate ought to have set up a committee to investigate the allegations and allow the members of the Nigerian public to follow up the process so as to get to the very roots of it with a view to ascertaining the veracity or otherwise of such an extensively damaging allegation. But instead, the Senate used legislative blackmail, sledgehammer and threats to shut up Senator Abdul Ningi and we the people of Nigeria think that this is an attempt to hide the truth from us. This is unconstitutional and undemocratic.”

Also, SOLACEBASE understands that this is not the first time of budget padding allegations in the history of Nigeria’s democracy. It affected the House of Representatives in 2016 when Abdulmumin Jibril, the chairman of the House Committee on Appropriation was suspended for 180 legislative days and removed as Chair, House Committee on Appropriation over an allegation he levelled against the then speaker of the house, Yakubu Dogara and three other principal members of the house of representatives, Yusuf Sulaimon Lasun, Alhassan Doguwa and Leo Okuweh Ogor.

Jibril claimed that the principal officers including the speaker of the House allotted to themselves a sum of N40 billion out of the 100 billion naira apportioned to the House of Representatives. He indicted the speaker and accused him of aiming to smuggle the sum of 30 billion naira into the 2016 budget. The speaker rebutted the allegation and subsequently described it as blackmail. Like Ningi, Abdulmumin Jibril was suspended. He was only recalled in 2018 after he submitted an apology letter to the House.

Constituency projects largesse

There was also fresh revelation at the Senate plenary, on Tuesday, indicating that ranking senators got N500m each for their constituency projects in the 2024 budget passed by the National Assembly. On the list of senators in the 10th Senate, at least 34 of them are ranking (not first-timers). With the revelation at the plenary, the senior senators must have got a total of N17bn as their constituency projects votes.

The senator representing Cross River North, Agom Jarigbe, said the majority of the senators are guilty of the budget padding scandal because some of the senior senators got N500 million each from the budgetary allocation.

“If we want to go into this issue, all of us are culpable. Some senators here, so-called senior senators, got N500 million each. I am a ranking senator. I didn’t get. Did I go to the press? We don’t have to go into those issues” Mr Jarigbe said.

Constituency projects have over the years been an avenue for lawmakers to take undue charge of these public projects and their funding as revealed by reports from anti-corruption agencies and CSOs. In fact, ex-President Muhammadu Buhari lamented that there was nothing to show for the N1 trillion allocated for this in the 10 years to 2018. The public bears the brunt as the projects usually add hardly any value. Often, the funds cannot be properly accounted for.

In August 2023, senators illegally got nothing less than N2 million each as allowance before proceeding on seven weeks of vacation. The N2 million allowance given to the senators was illegal as no such provision is made in the remuneration package approved Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the body authorised by law to prepare salaries and allowances for public servants.

During the plenary that day, Senate President Godswill Akpabio told the senators that some money had been credited to their accounts to enjoy their holidays. While lawmakers are entitled to ‘recess’ allowance under the law, which is 10 per cent of the annual basic salary of each legislator, it is paid once a year.

If a senator earns N2,026,400 according to RMAFC, their ‘recess’ allowance per annum should be N202,240. Indeed, Nigerians are dying so politicians may live.