By Monima Daminabo

When the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, Irishman Samuel Beckett, wrote his celebrated play ‘Waiting for Godot’ in 1948, he might not have had in mind the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari and the diminished premium by some of the latter’s lieutenants, on matching policies as well as programmes with timelines.

But the circumstance of the seemingly indeterminate fortunes of the 2017 budget, especially with respect to doubts over its eventual passage, confers on it the semblance of a Godot of sorts. The situation is like the more we wait, the less we see.

By the way, Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’ features two characters Vladimir and Estragon, who waited in vain for the arrival of another character named Godot. While their futile wait lasted they engaged in debating issues that were not geared towards actualising the fast-track of their mission, which was the arrival of their awaited Godot. In the course of their debate, they were joined by three other characters that only helped to take the debate away from the arrival of Godot.

Not a few watchers of the rites of passage of the 2017 budget are becoming alarmed at its bobbing fortunes which clearly imply significant setbacks for whatever economic recovery agenda the administration may have envisaged for the country, especially in the light of ongoing recession of the economy.

When tomorrow comes, the country would be welcoming a new month of May, not with the poetic merriness ushered by blooming flowers, as captured in soul lifting poetry and lullabies, but sad and long faces, etched with deep furrows being tell-tale signs of prolonged hunger and deepening despair, over uncertainty about the future.

This is the lot of Nigerians on the streets of Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Maiduguri, Makurdi and Jos – to name a few of the hundreds of Nigerian towns where contemporary daily life remains a ‘hand to mouth’ routine.

For an administration that recently launched an elaborate Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) which is for the purpose of restoring the country along winning ways, the least that can be expected is an across the board transformational disposition in the routine processes of governance. Unfortunately that is yet to be seen with the business as usual attitude of the leading lights of the administration, the imperative of urgency in the ERGP notwithstanding.

This is also as whatever link may exist between the urgency dictated by the ERGP and the sloppiness surrounding the 2017 budget exercise, remains nebulous, as far as the general public is concerned.

The import of the 2017 budget for the contemporary state of affairs in the country, is more significant than may be casually realised by the unwary, especially among the political elite on whose enterprise the fortunes of the dispensation rests. In consideration of its remediation essence for the pallid situation of the citizenry, the Senate had set mid-March: being two months ago, as the initial passage date, but the process fell through. The adoption of any new date became problematic as the various factors arising from the Executive side and beyond the control of the National Assembly came into play.

In the present situation with the economic recession ravaging the country, the budget remains the administration’s plan for resolving the situation. It provides the legal framework for driving the primary and by extension even the subsequent stages of the ERGP, and is statutorily designated to run from January 1st to December 31st 2017. This implies that even if it is enacted into law today it is at least four long months late, with grave implications for the ERGP and all Nigerians, no matter their situations in life.

The causative factors for the delay in the berthing of the 2017 budget may have been over flogged, even as the weaknesses in the Executive’s machinery of governance, have been identified as the prime factor in the syndrome. Beyond the late presentation of the 2017 budget to the National Assembly by the President on December 14th 2017, come other factors like the slovenliness of officials of MDAs in responding to budget defence summons, as well as their late inclusion of new projects into their respective and already submitted packages. In fact the recent drama in which a search conducted by operatives of the Nigeria Police Force on the residence of the Chairman of the Senate Committee of Appropriation Senator Danjuma Goje, and which spawned as its aftermath, an exchange of claims by both parties over the spectre of another failed passage of the budget, would not have been necessary if the enterprise had been completed on schedule.

The unmistakeable impression from the circumstances of the 2017 budget is that in reality, budgets do not enjoy any significant premium in the course of governance in Nigeria. And if the misfortunes of the federal government’s budget are anything to go by then it is easy to appreciate the level of degeneracy at the state and local government levels, where budgets only provide the framework for acquiring funds but are dispensed with at the points and channels of disbursement.

Little wonder then that the country’s public finance sector features such wide spread instances of massive diversions of public funds into private pockets; a syndrome that constitutes the more visible face of corruption, and in respect of which the ongoing anti-corruption fight is prosecuted.

Yet with all the commitment and even vehemence which the Buhari administration can muster, only trickles of the humongous stock of the country’s stolen wealth can be recovered. This situation dictates an unavoidable change in strategy, in the anti-corruption war, which should address the prevention of further haemorrhaging of the country’s common patrimony. After all there is better wisdom in crying less over spilt milk than preventing the cow from kicking the milking bucket and spilling more.

And such has to start by plugging as many of the legion of loopholes in the fiscal terrain of the country, with the budget process as the key element. For as has been advocated severally in this column and elsewhere, if Buhari’s agenda for change is to materialise, such must be predicated on the economic front with budget reform as the centre piece. Lamentably however, there is hardly any indication that the operators of the levers of this administration are yet to manifest such a tendency. Hence the palpable anxiety by concerned Nigerians and other stake holders in the nation’s economy, and the clamour for a change in direction by the administration; a task that implies identifying and changing all clogs in the wheel of progress. Such is the lifeline for the Buhari administration, that is if it still must enjoy its earlier wide spread appeal.