By Samuel Olusegun Precious
Budget recycling, poor implementation and lack of fiscal discipline has been the bane of Nigerian society, experts have warned.
The Budget transparency and tracking experts expressed deep concern over a widening gap between financial allocations and actual project execution in Nigeria, noting that impressive budgetary projections often fail to translate to real-world development.
This came up on Tuesday during Exceed FM’s news and current affairs programme, Big Talk where the South Regional Editor of Businessday Newspaper and Rivers State Representative of BudgIT, Mercy Eberechi Eze as guests.
Eberechi Eze stated: “ Drawing from my regular field tracking across Rivers State where about ten projects are monitored monthly across federal and state levels, most projects are either heavily delayed, abandoned, or never started, leaving communities with little to show for billions allocated.
She added that while national and state budgets appear progressive on paper with increasing allocations each year, implementation remains severely lacking.
“A major challenge is the exclusivity of budget documents, while budgets are technically designated as open documents available online, everyday citizens, particularly those in remote rural areas without reliable mobile internet struggle to access or understand them”, she noted.
She argued that true accountability is impossible when the actual beneficiaries of government projects have no means of accessing budget details to verify if projects designated for their communities are being executed.
On his part, veteran financial analyst and media practitioner, Elder Ignatius Chukwu urged the people to interrogate the budgeting process and their implementation.
“When you implement a budget everybody will benefit. That’s why everybody must get involved in the process. It must be taken very seriously..
Chukwu also criticized the simultaneous running of three federal budgets from 2024-2026. He also accused the federal government for committing a criminal offence by diverting the multi trillion naira Coastal Road Project without legislative approval. The announcement by the Minister of Works, Sen. Dave Umahi, that the coastal road would no longer go through the coastal states after Ogun State due to difficult terrain drew the ire of Nigerians, especially those in the affected states.
