Abuja — Former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof. Charles Soludo, has stated that the 2016 budget presented by President Muhammadu Buhari failed to make a departure from the budgets of the past administration, noting that it was almost identical to the one presented by former President Goodluck Jonathan.
According to Soludo, the present budget was a carbon copy of the one by Jonathan’s government, adding, “Defeating old bad ideas could be better that initiating new ones.”
He said this while speaking at the 13th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja yesterday. Soludo expressed concern over where the nation would be by 2050, saying Nigeria had underperformed despite earning over one trillion dollars from oil over the years.
He regretted that the money earned from oil has only kept the looting elite united and organised while the nation is now the fifth among states classified as failed states.
He said the Nigeria constitution was designed for sharing and consumption regarding the nations oil wealth and not necessarily for the development of the country’s dysfunctional system.
He regretted that the nation has been taking ten steps forward and eleven steps backward and urged the leaders to rise to the challenge posed by the fact that the period of oil boom is over.
Soludo said Nigeria has the potential to rise, but depended largely on the choices made by the leadership, arguing that he expected the 2016 budget to be more innovative to defeat our old bad ideas.
He said the budget had a historic 37 per cent deficit to make recurrent expenditure higher than total revenue, pointing out that it is not the way to go for a government with “change as its mantra”.
“The present budget is more of the same to the previous ones. Mr. Vice President (Prof. Yemi Osinbajo), if you scale your budget on the scale of GDP, it is almost the same with the previous government.
“It has a historic 37 per cent deficit as we never had it before. The truth is that you are borrowing 37 per cent with only 30 per cent allocated to capital projects.
“To craft the new agenda, we must defeat the old agenda. We cannot make progress in the country with the tools and agenda of the old,” Soludo said, adding that the APC-led government was over-following the fall in the price of crude oil globally.
He said the present administration needed to evolve a coherent economic plan and agenda as well as the right political architecture, stressing that anything less than this would mean that the leaders are building on a quicksand.
He regretted that 35 per cent of Nigeria land was already under threat of desertification which would affect agriculture, stressing that 11 to 12 states in the same zone are facing the problem of Boko Haram.
He warned that there would be unchecked migration by 2050 if oil and gas, agriculture, and solid minerals have limited impact on employment and urged the federal government to begin to take steps to improve manufacturing and skills acquisition for Nigerians. He added that Nigerians needed skills and where to use them and praised the administration for the preliminary steps it has taken to dismantle some of the things that strangulated the economy in the past few months.
Professor Soludo who was the last speaker at the event, said the 2016 budget represented a missed opportunity for the government to set new standards for a post-oil economy, urging the government to take bold and audacious steps to make changes happen. In his response, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo said that President Muhammadu Buhari and himself were prepared to serve with their integrity intact than any desire to make money in government.
He admitted that the nation was passing through a critical and interesting period, but that the President and himself remain committed to take the nation to the next level of social, political and economic development.
Osinbajo, who insisted on staying until the key note speakers made their remarks, said the present administration was taking a holistic approach in tackling the nation’s problems, stressing that Buhari and himself had a duty to put in their best and deliver a nation with the capacity to grow and develop.
According to him the present administration was determined to fix the nation’s justice system to end impunity and corruption, stressing that as things are today, both the rich and the poor escape justice in the country.
He said: “Everybody escapes justice in Nigeria, whether it is the poor or the rich. As of today, we have 12,000 convicted persons in our various prisons across the country in a country of 170 million people, the United States of America with a population of 300 million people have 2.2 million convicted persons in various prisons. With this figure, it is either Nigerians are peace loving or something is wrong with our system.”
On Soludo’s assessment of the 2016 budget, Osinbajo said far from being a budget based on compassion, as alluded by former CBN governor, the budget was designed to address the plight of over 120 million Nigerians who have been alienated from governance and living below poverty level.
“The budget is about the economic survival of this people, and if we don’t do it, we are only postponing the dooms day. The planned recruitment of 500,000 teachers will fill a huge gap in our education system, it would put people to work and further improve our education system,” the vice-president said.
He said technical and vocational education, conditional cash transfers,emphasis on small and medium scale enterprises, agriculture, especially the issues of erosion and desertification, the use of improved seedlings, and attracting private sector involvement, were all captured in the budget for the betterment of the country.
The vice-president also stated that the federal government was not by-passing manufacturing as some of the step it would take would boost activities in the sector irrespective of the fact that its WTO agreements would be affected but that Nigeria had no choice but to take such step.
