A long time ago, Constitutions Allowances (CA) were created, how they were created is another matter . In theory the CA are funds earmarked to be spent in various constituencies of the legislators. Over time, CA have become political slush funds.
You only have to study the statements of the previous House Committee on Appropriation Chairman Jibril Abdulmumin on how public funds are appropriated, earmarked and spent. Hon Abdulmumin himself single handedly set up a N4b “film village” from his CA, no oversight, no economic linkage plan, noting.
Now we see new bill by to set up a Constituency Development Catalyst Fund. the language of the bill is “A Bill for an Act to establish the Constituencies Development Catalyst Fund to provide a data bank for constituency projects, allocation and orderly disbursement of funds to constituencies and for prudent management, compilation of records, returns and report from constituencies as well as provide for other related matters, 2016 (S.B. 103), sponsored by Sen. Buhari Abdulfatai (Oyo North).
The NAAS attached a financial implications statement for this bill at N392m per annum if bill was passed in 2016.
This is an unnecessary bureaucracy and clearly unconstitutional
- At a cost of N392m (2016 costs) to fund bureaucracy is spending money Nigeria does not have
- This Bill establishes the Legislative as Executive administrators of fiscal revenues, clearly against the separation of powers principle. The NASS should appropriate, and the Executive execute, The Bill gives powers of “execution” to the Legislative
- It creates a super ministry without oversight.In essence, we will have 469 separate projects, inserted by House and Senate Members, who will monitor this? The Executive Chairman of this fund will have the powers to spend within the scope and purview of individual legislators not the economic plan of the Executive. For instance, if the Ministry of Health wants to focus on HIV and Abia Legislators wants to focus on Malaria, will there not be a dissipation of resources? do we not lose the power of scale?
- its inequitable. By this bill, Kano State for instance will have 27 projects, Abuja FCT will have 5 projects…..where is the equity?
This is simply a money grab by the Legislators.
We propose the NASS simply improves and actually steps up their power of oversight over federal projects, that is their job, to oversee and appropriate, not to chase contractors.
This Bill should be killed…
