El-Rufai vs NASS: The quest for budget accountability, transparency

By Musa Abdullah Krishi

On Friday, April 7, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, stirred the hornet’s nest when he charged the National Assembly to disclose its budget details to the Nigerian public for accountability and transparency.

El-Rufai took the opportunity to chide the  legislature at the closing ceremony of a retreat organized by the National Assembly management for its staff. He frontally  challenged the federal lawmakers, asserting  that they were ‘enemies’ of the federal government’s fight against corruption even as they failed to make their budget public.

“No transparency in your budget, nobody knows your budget, how much you get paid. Publications are made about your salaries and allowances that I don’t believe are true but cannot be defended because there is no transparency about your budget: personal costs and so on and so forth. I think you can do something about that to clear all the rumours and remove all the evil stories that are largely untrue,” he said.

Even before El-Rufai’s challenge, there were calls from different quarters for the National Assembly to open its budget details to the public.

Consequently, the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, made several promises, beginning from November 15, 2015 to make such  details public.

“By the time we come into the 2016 budget, at the end of the year, it will be clearer because people just see one item line. …you will see what goes to the Senate and what goes to the House of Reps. You are going to see what goes to the management, what goes to the Legislative Institute and we are going to make all these open and clear,” he said.

But till the end of 2016, Saraki could not keep his words and budget details of the National Assembly remains secret till date.

At the Kaduna event, Saraki, who was represented by the Senate Leader, Ahmad Lawan (APC Yobe), said the legislature was on the forefront of the fight against corruption through various laws that enable anti-graft agencies function effectively.

On his part, Speaker Yakubu Dogara said the management of the National Assembly had been directed to make the budget details public, beginning from this year.

He then challenged El-Rufai to take his campaign to the other arms of government and advise his counterparts in other states to make their security votes and local government funds public.

“I would like to challenge you to champion the call for transparency in budgeting and budgetary process of the National Assembly to the other arms of government. We want to see clearly how chief executives of states are paid, what they spend monthly as security votes, and also publish what happens to local government funds,” Dogara said.

Thus, El-Rufai on Monday, April 10, published part of the state’s security budget and his earnings as a governor.

He said: “The Kaduna State government has consistently made public all its budget details. In 2016, in an unprecedented step, the state published not only its own budget, but also that of all the 23 local government councils online on www.openkaduna.com.ng website.

The governor gave the breakdown of his salary, based on the February 2017 slip as follows: Basic Salary; N185,308.75, Hardship Allowance; N370,617.50, Gross Pay; N555,926.25, PAYE; N85,404.51 and Net Pay; N470,521.74.

The following day, Tuesday, April 11,  Dogara also made public his monthly pay for six months, starting from October last year.

The slips showed that the speaker received N346,577 from October 2016 to January 2017 while he got N206,577 and N276,577 for February and March 2017 respectively.

The House of Reps spokesman, Abdulrazak Namdas (APC Adamawa), who made the slips public, said El-Rufai was smart by half because the challenge Dogara threw at him was for state governors to publish their security votes, not states’ security budgets, as well as local government funds.

The House then advised the governor to leave it alone and rather face the security challenges in the southern part of the state and other governance issues.

“We wish to advise the Kaduna State governor, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, to concentrate his efforts in governing Kaduna State and stop undermining and distracting the National Assembly in playing its constitutionally assigned role in nation building. We are aware that there are serious security issues he should be grappling with in Southern Kaduna and other governmental issues facing him. He should not give the impression that he has no challenging work to do in Kaduna State,” Namdas said.

Is El-Rufai right in his challenge?

The Executive Director, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, says the challenges thrown by both sides would help deepen Nigeria’s democracy and engender transparency and accountability.

“I think this issue has further thrown the challenge to both arms of government, the executive and legislature. Nigerians have been yearning for prudent management of the National Assembly budget as well as that of the executive. The senate president made several promises to make the NASS budget open, but that didn’t happen. A lot of people were concerned about that. The need for us to have an open and transparent budget has been there.

“Ordinarily, in other places, this wouldn’t be an issue because it’s in the public domain. So, El-Rufai has done well by doing that. It is a clarion call for all arms of government to make their budgets known to the public. This will clear the air on a lot of suspicion that’s going on. In my opinion, El-Rufai is helping in the process to open budgetary system,” he said.

Rafsanjani said some government agencies hide under “the same ridiculous provision” for security budget, which should not be the case.

“The second aspect is the fact that it has become so ridiculous that almost all MDAs have what they call security vote. I think it’s high time we stopped diverting public funds in the name of security vote. Beyond the disclosure by El-Rufai, we demand that there should be accountability on their part to make every kobo spent on that public,” he said.

Reminded that what El-Rufai made public was the state security budget and not his office’s security vote, Rafsanjani said: “The issue is simple. As El-Rufai made that public, we should also encourage him to make the security vote public.

“At the same time, the NASS should follow what El-Rufai did. Both the Senate and the House of Reps should do same. We wait to see when they will do that. They made the same promise that they made in the past two years, so I don’t think it’s enough to make promises. Let’s see it on ground. I think they should immediately do that because of the failure to keep to their words in the past,” Rafsanjani added. (Daily Trust)