Fear Grips Perm Secs and Directors Over Manipulation of 2016 Budget Figures

 

Directors and permanent secretaries in many ministries, departments and agencies of government are in fear over revelations by the Presidency that it will probe bogus figures injected into the 2016 budget.

 

It has been revealed that top government officials who participated in the review of the budget might soon face sack after the government found malpractices and manipulation of figures to the 2016 budget it submitted. This has made the guilty officials panicky.

 

A Presidency sources had, on Saturday, revealed attempts by a ‘budget mafia’ in the Federal Government’s bureaucracy to scuttle innovations introduced into the budget by inflating figures.

 

It was learnt that the mafia proposed a budget of N9.7tn for capital spending and overheads, excluding personnel cost, as against the Presidency’s initial total estimate of about N8tn.

 

The group was said to have proposed N3tn as overheads alone out of the N9.7tn, a figure the Presidency later slashed to N163bn, Punch reports.

 

The source in the Presidency, who claimed that the mafia was responsible for the controversial provisions in the eventual N6.07tn budget sent to the National Assembly by the Presidency, added, “These bureaucrats also proposed to spend N2.1trn on personnel for the 2016 estimate compared to about N1.8tn in the 2015 budget.”

 

A director in one of the ministries revealed that many of his colleagues were startled about the revelation from the Presidency, stating that heads would roll as a result of the scam.

 

The source said, “What we read in the news about the padding of the budget by some civil servants who the Presidency referred to as constituting a ‘budget mafia’ is very alarming.

 

The National Assembly on Sunday asked President Muhammadu Buhari to institute a high-powered panel to investigate the alleged padding of the 2016 budget by some top civil servants and said those who are found wanting must be prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.

 

The Senate, also is of the view that Senator Udo Udoma must be sanctioned for the role he played in the controversial padding of budget.

 

The senators argued that civil servants could not have perpetrated the embarrassing act alone without the connivance and collaboration of the Budget Office, supervised by Udoma.

 

Speaking through the Chairman, House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Mr. Abdulrazak Namdas, in Abuja, the House expressed happiness that it was the Presidency that discovered the alleged fraud.

 

Namdas recalled that in the past, the National Assembly was easily blamed for such malpractices “even where the legislature knew nothing about them.”

 

He added that having admitted that it had identified the culprits, the Presidency should immediately commence the process of prosecuting them to serve as example for others.