The recent crisis rocking the House of Representatives over the issue of budget padding has been well explained in this picture.
This is the perfect picture explaining the budget padding
A cartoonist has tried to explain the recent brouhaha between House of Reps speaker Yakubu Dogara and former Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriation, Mr. Abdulmumin Jibrin
who accused the former of padding the 2016 budget.
Understanding padding
Padding the budget means making the budget proposal larger than the actual estimates for the project. This is done either by increasing a project's expenses or decreasing its expected revenue.
The goal of budget padding is to get an approval committee to grant an artificially high level of funding to the budget maker's proposed project.
There is some contention over the exact definition of padding: some contend that inflating expenses to take expected inflation into account is responsible foresight rather than padding, while others see any increase beyond current estimates as padding.
Padding the budget is a practice that some people use in business when submitting a budget for approval. It artificially inflates the proposed budget in order to give the project room to expand or to cover unexpected costs. Many see budget padding as unethical, but its practitioners defend it on the grounds of practicality.
In Nigeria, those who pad the budget use it to allocate huge sums to themselves in the name of constituency projects which they later pocket without executing such projects.