The first thing that the legislative and executive branches of Nigeria’s government do every year is to break the law – to violate the 1999 Constitution as amended. This is not peculiar to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) political party. It has been the norm almost without exception since the advent of this republic 26 years ago. However, is it possible to rape a document that some people have insisted was founded on an egregious lie from the get-go, the preamble. “We the people…” in our Constitution laid the marker for who and what we intend to be. That significant part of the document’s preamble outlines the fundamental purposes and guiding principles of that Covenant. Permit us to reproduce it here.
“We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, having firmly and solemnly resolved, to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God, dedicated to the promotion of inter-African solidarity, world peace, international cooperation and understanding; and to provide for a Constitution for the purpose of promoting the good governance and welfare of all persons in our country, on the principles of freedom, equality and justice, and for the purpose of consolidating the unity of our people. Do hereby make, enact and give to ourselves the following Constitution:* Many of the claims in the preamble of our grundnorm are as aspirational as they are untrue and dubious. They fail in the area of aspirations because we have not shown any appetite to attain the goals. The other claims that have been disputed included “We the people…” . Some people argue that we do not have a fit-for-purpose people’s constitution, instead what we are operating is a decree by the military dressed as a constitution. The contention is that the phrase: ”We the people” is a misrepresentation since the constitution is not autochthonous, which means that it was not written by the people of Nigeria themselves. It was a document framed to suit the then head of a military junta, the late Gen. Sani Abacha, who was set to shed his khaki for ‘agbada’. He died suddenly and mysteriously.
Another contentious issue is the claim of “Having firmly and solemnly resolved to live in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign…” If the constitution was not written by the people and given to themselves, the point of resolving “to live in unity and harmony” becomes mute. You can’t live in unity and harmony in an environment of imposition and oppression and deep, mutual distrust. The preamble also declared that the country is an ”indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation…”. Here, the constitution gives itself away as a product of coercion. The claim of a ”nation” is laughable because Nigeria is not a nation, and there’s no indication yet that it is aspiring to be one, not with lingering government – promoted divisive policies. How do you promote a sense of oneness and belonging when rulers say that sections of the country which did not vote for them in elections will be deprived of whatever is due to them from the commonwealth. And the rulers proceed to do so. Or when appointments are so blatantly nepotistic. Or when Nigerians are reminded to write in official forms that they are from Anambra or Kebbi or Ekiti state in spite of where they have been residing, doing business, paying taxes, and raising families. A nation cannot be forged in an environment where you remain a stranger in a place where you were born, where you lived all your life, and where you died and was buried.
The point to note is that where some of the key claims of the grundnorm of any country is open to contestation, it should be expected that some people will be tempted to operate at the fringes, and indeed to break the law. This is especially so for those who wield state powers and control the instruments of coercion. And that’s partly the reason why our rulers in the legislative and executive branches start every year by breaking the law, and flouting the constitution. In the case of what we erroneously call our national budget, these arms of government start breaking the law from the last quarter of the preceding year. The 1999 Constitution set the fiscal year for January 1 – December 31. It also stipulated that the executive branch should deliver the fiscal document at least 90 days before January 1, so that the lawmakers would have sufficient time to scrutinize the budget. This constitutional prescription has been observed in the breach from the beginning. Even the wiggle room which provided that the national assembly can, through law, make the commencement and end dates flexible is usually ignored.
Section 318 of the Constitution defines Nigeria’s financial year as a 12-month period starting from January 1- December 31, or any other date prescribed by the National Assembly (NASS). In line with this the president is expected to present the budget to NASS at least 90 days before the end of the financial year so as to allow lawmakers time to do the needful. The NASS is mandated to pass the budget ahead of the new financial cycle, while the president should sign or withhold assent within 30 days of receiving the money bill. If the president declines to sign for whatever reasons, the bill can still become law if passed by a two-thirds majority of the senate and the house of representatives. If there had ever been a contemplation of overriding a presidential veto of a bill, it has certainly not been in the current NASS that declared from the onset that their raison d’etre is kowtowing to the whims and caprices of a president with unmistakable imperial tendencies, an aspiring Supreme Leader. And the very public romance between the executive and legislative branches of government, and possibly the judiciary, is taking a toll on Nigerians, and stunting the development of the country. In local parlance, what the branches of government are doing in terms of budgets and in other areas of pretences at governance is “rub my back I rub your back”. The tragedy is that even if diligence is applied to preparing our budgets, and their implementations are driven by altruistic motives, they will still not move the needle towards national development and economic growth given the size of the budgets in terms of available money. For a country that is lacking in so many areas, both the money available and the one borrowed are significantly inadequate to make a dent on the developmental aspirations of Nigerians. The situation becomes worse when the intentions behind our budgets are dubious.
This has been the problem of our country for years. And at no time has the desire to mindlessly steal from the people been more brazen and daring than this year as manifested in the 2025 budget. As if to mock Nigerians it was tagged ‘Budget of Restoration’. Restoration to whom? Certainly not the long suffering and hapless citizens. Our rulers are having a ball at our expense. If it were not so, the man who passes as the president of the senate, Godswill Akpabio, would not be singing at a public forum, and in the presence of Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who he set out to humour that things are getting better in this country where people are dropping below the poverty line every hour, and some are committing suicide in the face of hopelessness. In spite of rigging the figures in the guise of rebasing, inflation is running at double digits, unemployment is massive, energy deficit is pervasive and its cost is prohibitive, manufacturers are groaning, while our rulers are living in obscene luxury. By the way, the clown who says that ‘things are getting better’ in Nigeria is not able or willing to explain to compatriots why our country has stubbornly remained the poverty capital of the world since 2019, and why more than 150 million of our citizens are dimensionally poor?
This same man, Akpabio, presided over the most fraudulent appropriation bill so far in the history of Nigeria. In cahoots with Tinubu and other collaborators they have foisted on Nigerians a swindle sheet in the name of a budget. And weeks after BudgIT Foundation, a civil society group, exposed the fraud that was signed into law on February 28 as 2025 budget of restoration, neither the executive nor the legislature has bothered to speak to the mind boggling revelations of criminal insertions and crazy costs of executing the projects secretly and unconscionably smuggled into the budget. Armed with irrefutable receipts BudgIT reported that the NASS inserted 11,122 projects worth about N7 trillion into the 2025 budget. It said that this should be concerning because of the potential for budgetary abuse and diversion of resources from critical national development needs. Some of the notable and curious insertions are 1,477 streetlight projects worth N393.29 billion; 7,138 boreholes for N114.53 billion; 2,122 ICT-related projects amounting to N505.79 billion; and, the appropriation of N6.74 billion for the empowerment of traditional rulers. From these allocations Nigerians are supposed to accept that, for instance, the installation of one streetlight will cost a minimum sum of N266 million while one borehole will be sunk with N16 million. As has been jocularly said in social media posts, we do not need this gigantic sum of money even if our aim was to become the light of the world. And to strike water for a borehole in the Sahara desert will not cost anything close to N16 million each. It has been my contention that the APC regime under Tinubu holds Nigerians in utter disdain and contempt. Otherwise, how do we explain that weeks after this perfidy was placed in the public domain, and in spite widespread outcries, nobody in the executive or the legislature has thought it necessary and proper to address the daylight robbery where appropriations for road construction are allocated to research institutes and digging of boreholes to driveby fast food joints? We may be on a long journey to nowhere in this increasingly and seemingly benighted country.