Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, has signed the 2017 budget into law. A national budget is a country’s projected income and expenditure profile for a particular period. In the case of the nation’s 2017 budget, it became law by mid-year, which was quite late. But Nigerian governments have always been late in everything except when they want to ‘share the money’. So, lateness in making the budget ‘active’ may not be news to most Nigerians who have witnessed such undue proclivity to lateness among government officials.

Indeed, we are always late. Presidents come late to office. Governors arrive late at functions. Ministers take their time and end up late even to meetings they convene. Lateness is in our character. It is a terrible habit. And it has kept us late in growth and development. We’re late in research and development; late in quality education and good governance. We have even creatively justified our collective predilection to lateness with a weird phrase: Nigerian time, a strange euphemism for lateness and a justification that your lateness to a function is not out of place.

Our culture of lateness is such that when a Nigerian receives an invitation to attend a programme by 10.00am, he will tweak the time with the phrase ‘10 for 11’. And that settles it. Don’t expect such person by 10.00am. You will thank your stars if he or she shows up by 11.00am. So, when the 2017 budget is signed into law in June, you cannot really quarrel with those who went into a spasm of hysteria in celebration. They should celebrate, after all, we now have a budget. But this lateness is really not my worry.

I am also not worried by the fact that the budget, an Executive bill, entered the National Assembly  N7.298 trillion fat and came out N7.441 trillion fatter, adding a hefty N143 billion in weight. We do not need a court of law to tell us that parliament has the right to adjust a budget, up or down. Budgeting is not garbage in, garbage out. It requires sound reasoning, critical analysis and clear-minded review of the various components. So, the National Assembly was right to adjust the budget. Period!

The next stage is implementation. This is one of my worries. We treat budgets with levity in Nigeria. A budget, whether national or state, is an Act of parliament, meaning it is a law of the land. If it is a law, it means we must obey the planks of such law. It also means we must adhere to both the letters and spirit of such law. By extrapolation, it means not implementing the budget, over-implementation or under-implementation without recourse to the parliament, the appropriating authority, amounts to infraction, a breach of the law and an impeachable offence. But do we really bother about such stuff here? You know we don’t. Here again, I do not worry much.

My chief worry in the case of the 2017 budget was the manner it was signed into law. It was signed by the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, a professor of law, with specialization in law of evidence. Osinbajo became acting President on May 5 when President Muhammadu Buhari jetted out of the country for further medicare in London. The President’s medical trip was not an emergency. He had the presence of mind to transmit a letter to the National Assembly ceding power to his vice as Acting President according to section 145 of the 1999 constitution.

For emphasis, section 145(1) states: “Whenever the President is proceeding on vacation or is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, he shall transmit a written declaration to the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives to that effect, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, the Vice President SHALL PERFORM THE FUNCTIONS OF THE PRESIDENT AS ACTING PRESIDENT” (emphasis mine).

In the instant case, Buhari transmitted a letter to the leadership of the National Assembly, which is commendable. His predecessors never did. By transmitting such letter to parliament, Buhari ceded all Presidential powers to Osinbajo. Such powers include the power to hire and fire, sign budget and any other duty heretofore discharged by Buhari. Why then did the same Osinbajo require a letter from Buhari authorizing him to sign the 2017 budget? Is it not a blatant travesty of the law and a desecration of every sacred totem on the altar of democracy for a President that has ceded power to the vice president to still be pulling the levers of authority and power vicariously?

Mallam Garba Shehu, one of the President’s media aides issued a grandiloquent statement to this effect. The statement read: “Following the receipt of a full brief on the 2017 Appropriation Bill as passed by the National Assembly, and to buttress the unity at the highest level of government, President Muhammadu Buhari has indicated that it is in the interest of the nation’s economy for the Acting President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, to sign the Appropriation Bill into law.

“In a letter dated June 10, 2017, which he personally signed and addressed to the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma, the President also said he was ‘pleased by the joint resolution that the Executive would submit next year’s budget proposals by October 2017 and the National Assembly will conclude the Appropriation process by December 2017, so that the country can return to a normal fiscal period from next year onwards.’”

My goodness, this does not “buttress unity at the highest level of government”, it buttresses mischief on the part of those who conjured a voodoo theory that Osinbajo needs such ‘letter of authority’. The worst of it all is that the actors in this circus are lawyers. Both Osinbajo and Udoma are lawyers. They should know better. Whoever contrived the theory that Buhari needed to instruct Osinbajo to sign the budget is leading democracy by the nose. It is a dangerous precedence which its promoters cannot defend in the court of democracy.

Enough of this mischief, please! But Osinbajo should also be Presidential in his actions. Why did he have to wait for a letter of authority? He should not commit illegality just to be seen as politically correct. Buhari is still Nigeria’s President but he is on sick leave. We all take sick leave in our moments of physical impairment. Buhari did the right and legitimate thing by transmitting a letter to the National Assembly, he should not undo his good deed by contending for the same lever of power he has constitutionally ceded to his lieutenant.  While I wish President Buhari well and quick recovery, I dare say that we do incalculable damage to our democracy when we know the right thing to do but choose to do the opposite just to satiate our ego and megalomaniacal indulgences.

Whereas we have inflicted much damage to the 2017 budget; whereas from its controversial, albeit late, entry to the National Assembly to its impoundment (or is it arrest) by the police in the home of Senator Danjuma Goje and now the circus of who has authority to sign it, the 2017 budget has seen more than enough trouble to give it a hunchback, let’s pray it does not get torpedoed in the course of implementation. Let all the circus actors return to their senses and rally to restore the sagging faith of the masses in government by not playing politics with its implementation as they did with its preparation. I so move!

Culled: Sunday Sun