Frontline business professionals have said the failure to implement previous budgets on human development allowed security to take much of the 2012 budget proposals.In the budget presented to the National Assembly by President Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday, the highest vote went to security, an area perceived to be challenging for the administration.Security got N922bn, education got N400.15bn, healthN282.8bn, worksN180.8bn, power N161.4bn, agricultureN78.98bn, Niger Delta N59.7bn, petroleum resourcesN59.7bn, transportationN54.8bn, aviationN49.2bn, among others.Although the budget is tagged a stepping stone to economic transformation, analysts said its breakdown did not suggest that things would go that way except if the votes for education, health, works, agriculture, power were religiously implemented.They urged the Federal Government to ensure accountability in the use of the security vote.The President and Chairman of Governing Council, National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria, Chief Lugard Aimiuwu, said Jonathan and his team must ensure that the security vote was disbursed in a way that would bring a recovery to the economy.He said all security agencies must be co-opted and be adequately trained to get the job done; while international allies must also be strategically courted.He said, I really appreciated what the National Security Adviser did recently when he held a meeting with past security advisers and service chiefs on the state of the nation. That was an intelligent thing to do; it showed that the man is a true professional. That is a crucial aspect of gathering intelligence.The Federal Government must prove its sincerity in putting so much on security.A director of the Lagos Business School, Prof. Pat Utomi, said it was unfortunate that a budget tagged economic transformation had its highest vote on security.He said that budgets in Nigeria had become mere documents, which the government did what it pleased with.He called for a strategy that would prove that the FG understood what it wanted to achieve from the budget and not just pay lip service to security and economic transformation.He said, For a long time, I have not been paying close attention to the national budget because of the frustrations and disappointments that have arisen from non-implementation of same.This is a country where the budget is not fully implemented and they talk of returning money to government coffers. If we are serious about it this time, let emphasis be placed on funding all the security agencies, because it has become a huge challenge.Utomi, a management expert and entrepreneur, tasked civil society groups to monitor the government to ensure that results were achieved.He said it was unfortunate that Nigeria currently ranked very low in Millennium Development Goals compared to smaller African countries it gave aids to.
Click here to read full news..
