Buhari to fire ‘mafia in civil service’ over controversial 2016 budget

President Muhammadu Buhari is set to fire some top civil servants who allegedly sabotaged the efforts of the government to present a budget that is prudent and frugal at best.

Two top level civil servants to Sahara Reporters that “bureaucratic resistance and entrenched systemic corrupt practices dogged every move by the Presidency during the preparation of the 2016 budget.”

Also, President Buhari has reportedly given a directive for the bureaucrats who sabotaged the budget to be singled out for punitive actions.

One of the sources told the New York-based news outlet that when some top civil servants learned that the presidency was considering a huge budget of N8 trillion which would reflect increased capital expenditure, they pumped up the figures of the budget to N9.7 trillion for overhead and capital spending excluding personnel spending.

In the budget, the said civil servants had earmarked over N3 trillion for overhead spending only but the presidency cut it down to N163 billion which is 8% lower than the 2015 budget which was N177 billion.

“This indicated that the Buhari administration significantly cut some of the main provisions,” the source said.
Furthermore, bureaucrats also proposed N2.1 trillion for personnel in the 2016 budget against the N1.8 trillion in the 2015 budget which the presidency cut down to N1.7 trillion in the final copy of the budget.

The sources revealed that President Buhari was angered by the games the bureaucrats played but chose to stay calm so as to meet the deadline for the submission of the budget to the National Assembly.

“While Mr. President has always stood for prudence and against waste, the bureaucrats were sneaking in controversial provisions that clearly didn’t represent the president’s standards and priorities,” said the source.

He added: “Anybody who knows the president would realize that he could not have approved or endorsed some of the questionable provisions.”

The sources revealed that many of the controversial provisions in the budget were smuggled in by people described as “the budget mafia in the civil service, made up of people who consider the period of budgeting as their time of massive opportunity to arrange the stealing of public funds.”

However, the smugglers would be fired soon according to the sources.

The president had made it clear to the officials of the Budget Office and the National Planning Commission that his administration intended to adopt the zero-based budgeting process brought up by experts he enlisted.

But according to the sources, the officials in these offices refused to brief the Ministry of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma on the presidential directive.

“For weeks after the minister was sworn in, the civil servants continued to plan on the old budget model, stalling the decision to use the zero-based budget until Udoma, a former senator, found out from the Presidency.“

Sahara Reporters learned that the bureaucratic stalling led to a huge waste of valuable time, with the civil servants calculating that the Presidency would be forced to abandon the zero-based budget once time was running out.

However, by early December, Udoma and the Presidency restructured the budget planning efforts around the zero-based budget.

An expert who was enlisted to facilitate the new process told the New York based news outlet that the civil servants still found ways to sabotage the budget.

“They took longer than required to come back with revisions to their estimates. In the process, many of the provisions already marked down for revision simply got snuck in, effectively pushing the Presidency into the defensive in the face of public backlash,” he said.

A presidential aide added that the items which vexed the public in the budget, over 6,000 of them were there “because some of the civil servants who were meant to supervise the final product were also hostile to the zero-based process. So their uncooperative attitude just compounded the problem.”

The problems however, are not expected to come up in future budget proposals.

The source added: “Some people were so bent on exploiting the system that the time was simply not sufficient to stop them. But since the budget is only an estimate, the implementation part now offers the Presidency the opportunity to tame the corrupt intentions and practices.”

The enlisted expert also said: “We were virtually doing vigils to beat the time since the budget had to be presented before the end of the year to the National Assembly. And while some of the civil servants eventually cooperated, those who were resistant caused the insertions of many of the provisions that are now embarrassing the government.”

On the several duplications found in the budget proposals, the expert explained that it was “due to the difficulty experienced by the software that had been in use for planning the budget in the past. That software does not easily accommodate the zero-based budget template.”

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