Senators push motion for effective budget in Nigeria

Sen. Stella Oduah (PDP, Anambra) on Thursday sponsored a motion alongside five other lawmakers on ‘the need to establish a Visionary Budget-Driven National Planning Framework for Nigeria’.

Speaking with journalists after plenary, Oduah said the motion was about having a budget with a purpose which is well articulated and easy to be applied.

According to her, this motion does not have anything to do with politics because having budgets that are disjointed and truncated has not helped Nigeria’s growth.

“Budgeting itself and national planning has to be in tandem with the global best practices and our national growth plan, therefore, the budget should speak to the vision, and the vision should be about elevating the lives of our people.

“So having budgets that are disjointed and truncated and fluid hasn’t helped us and is not helping us; this has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with us as a people, it has to do with our growth, it has to do with prioritising where we need to prioritise.

“So MDAs and parastatals that have to be the key drivers of any budget, (depending on what the goal of the budget is), will be prioritised in the budgeting application, and so it is about having a proper circle of a budgeting process so we don’t have any gaps.

“And at the end of the day, we can say that the money we are going to spend is going to be ‘X’ and in spending ‘X’, we are going to accomplish ‘Y’, but for Y to be there, we need to have ‘ABC’ as the key players,“ she said.

Oduah lauded the lawmakers for swiftly approving the motion to the next level of roundtables and reiterated that the motion is supposed to aid the country plan efficiently and effectively to ensure the citizens live better lives.

“The Senate has approved this to get to the next level, and that next level would be a roundtable where all the key players would sit down and talk about our developmental plan, the vision of Mr President and what we want to accomplish with the budget.

“So regardless of which party is in power, it will have a budget, and a plan to follow which can stand the test of time, that is what a visionary driven budget is all about.

“The legislative intervention will be of a policy that will stand the test of time and that would be enforced by all budgetary officers; the motion has called to attention the need for us to have the budgeting process.

“The roundtable will produce the policy framework which becomes the insertions of the policy itself.

“So you have a policy where all the key players are participants, when you participate in any policy, the tendency is that you will ensure it doesn’t fail, and hoping as a law it shouldn’t fail, she said.“