The Federal Government is almost concluding arrangements to sanction some top officials for their alleged attempt to sabotage efforts aimed at making the 2016 Budget truly people-oriented.
A Presidency source who pleaded anonymity told journalists in Abuja on Saturday that the officials who he described as “the budget mafia” were responsible for some controversial provisions noticed in the budget proposal currently before the National Assembly.
He claimed that the officials’ aim was to frustrate all the innovations introduced into budget preparation by the present administration for their own selfish interests.
Giving specific examples, the source said after learning that the Presidency was considering a huge budget of possibly N8trn in order to significantly increase capital expenditure, bureaucrats brought a proposal of N9.7trn for overhead and capital spending without personnel spending.
He said of the proposed N9.7trn, the bureaucrats planned to spend N3trn on overhead alone.
He added that not comfortable with the arrangement, the Presidency eventually slashed the proposed N3trn to N163bn. The figure is by eight percent lower than the N177bn in the 2015 budget.
“Bureaucrats also proposed to spend N2.1trn on personnel for the 2016 estimates compared to about N1.8trn in the 2015 budget. But the Presidency also cut this down to N1.7trnn in the final estimates sent to the legislature.
“The situation and its fallout were so bad that it provoked the annoyance of the President who nonetheless kept his cool buying time so as to meet the target date for the presentation of the budget in line with extant laws and regulations governing the budget process,” he said
He added that the officials also attempted to sabotage the zero-based budgeting introducing by the present administration because it would not serve their selfish interests.
The source said top civil servants involved in the resistance would soon be shown the way out.
He explained further, “Zero-Based Budgeting proceeds on the basis of justifying need and costs rather than the annually incremental approach that transfers expenses from previous budgets with added upward reviews.
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