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About
N5 billion will go to service major construction works in the nation’s health
sector in the 2020 proposed budget, but development experts,
working around accountability process in public budgeting, worry that this may
come to waste because the projects they are nominated to develop are not
captured in the vision of the Ministry of Health, the regulatory institution
for health development in the country.
In the proposed budget, a minimum of 20 health-related projects
got generous appropriation but only for construction purposes and without
regard for how such health facilities will be subsequently manned, staffed and
remunerated, since the Ministry of Health which has these responsibilities has
been bypassed by this budgetary arrangement.
“How do you allow a whopping N5 billion in public spending to
create projects when you make no provisions or appropriation on how to staff
them or give them functional meaning?” Nkem Ilo, chief executive at Public and
Private Development Centre [PPDC], lamented in an interview with Dataphyte.
Over the years, construction is a notorious subhead through
which corruption has been enabled in the Nigerian contracting and procurement
process, and Ms Ilo, whose organisation is a leading voice for transparency and
accountability in the Nigerian civic sector, worries that the same fate that
had befallen most abandoned projects “invariably awaits” these 20 nominated
projects in the 2020 proposed budget.
Ms Ilo’s position is shared by Segun Elemo, the executive
director at Paradigm Leadership Support Initiative [PLSI], who worries as
well that unless the “integrity deficit driving budgeting process in the
country” is courageously addressed, the “problem of budget padding” will always
lead to wasteful investments” such as placement of projects in wrong or
unrelated agencies.
“This is what is responsible for the series of uncompleted or
abandoned projects in the country, and it is all because of the absence of
needs-assessment and political underhand in project allocation,” Mr Elemo said.
Influential project monitoring reports from bodies like UDEME (PTCIJ), TRACKA (BudgIT)
and Value
for Money (PLSI) corroborate the concern about government
profligacy through multiple spending around single projects spread across or
hidden in many agencies that were ultimately not completed or abandoned by
MDAs.
20 Nominated Silent Destinations for Hiding Projects
The
2020 proposed budget offers the best illustration of this art of hiding
projects in “silent” institutions. In this particular case, whereas the
key reference was for health spending, the nominated hidden outlets are 20
non-health institutions otherwise called Ministries, Departments and Agencies
or MDAs.
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20 “hidden” destinations of purported health spendings in 2020 proposed budget
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