A mixed-bag of reactions has trailed the flippant contribution of the minority leader of the House of Representatives to the July 19 House debate on the perceived poor implementation of the 2012 Budget by the executive. Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila had sought an amendment to the motion on the matter and wanted an ultimatum on the executive for 100 per cent implementation of the budget by September otherwise President Goodluck Jonathan would face an impeachment proceeding. The amendment failed.But despite the putative noble motive of the House, and the readiness of some of its members to go the whole hog upon resumption from recess on September 18, it scarcely comes along to the Nigerian public that the impeachment motive is squarely rooted on any sublime intention or driven by the greater interest of the nation. In fact, several independent media reports have been point-blank with their deductions that pecuniary interest of the lawmakers is the wing upon which the impeachment threat is riding. The members over the months have been grumbling over the non-payment of their constituency project fund by the government. This grumble can be further examined from the members' view of Federal Government that was once freely shelling out hundreds of millions of naira as constituency project fund to each and every federal legislator, and had to abruptly cut it down, and with 2012 Appropriation, the Jonathan government, through a tenacious fight by the Finance Minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, sliced it even further down to N20 million per quarter. The legislators are further chagrined that seven months into the implementation of the year's recurrent budget, this sum has not hit their respective bank accounts owing to the Finance Minister's insistence that due process must be followed this time in the disbursement. It also makes sense to query the reasonableness in the demand for a 100 per cent implementation of the capital budget, three months ahead of the expiration of the fiscal year.No matter how it is weighed, N20 million holds a huge attraction, and this to a good extent excuses the itching by the lawmakers to grab this sum, which as a matter of fact, they unilaterally inserted in the 2012 federal budget for themselves. For some observers, therefore, what played out on the floor of the House on July 19 was an alert from the federal lawmakers to the executive that their patience has thinned out. More than ever before, this impeachment threat is so vastly tarnished by the pungent odour of money. Nigerians can vouch from the look of things that the House members would never have barred any fang at the implementation of the capital budget if their constituency project fund share from the recurrent have long nestled in their bank accounts. While every Nigerian would want the Federal Government to faithfully expend the appropriated funds for capital expenditure on the provision and uplift of infrastructure in the country, some of the legislators who have passed off its impeachment threat on the President as altruistic should in the same breath do Nigerians the additional favour of pointing out the capital project items, listed in the budget that is not being given a look-in by the executive, and those which they are convinced would not get a look-in from the government till March next year, when the appropriation for capital projects would expire. By the time this is done convincingly, the negative value judgment they passed on the government on July 19 would move from the realm of a rash blanket verdict to thoughtful pin-point specifics. Whereas the government claims it has recorded a 56 per cent success implementation rate as at July 20, it may perhaps help the image of the House to shed reasonable light on the assessment formula it applied in reaching its judgment on the capital budget implementation. It must be pointed out that if morality was to be allowed to bear on the affairs of men, a House, whose members are severely wracked by allegations of their entanglement in official corruption should find it needful in times like this to gauge its credibility perception index with the public before dabbling into certain things. If this had been done, words such as 'we cannot be blackmailed', as being ascribed to the House spokesman, Zakari Mohammed in the media on this matter, would have spewed out with more caution. The keen appetite of the legislators for constituency project fund has also thrown up appraisals of the impact of this initiative within our system in the past 13 years of democracy. The fund was conceived for the purpose of bringing Federal Government presence down to the grassroots with the execution of projects by the legislators in their native communities, in conjunction with the Millennium Development Goals office (MDGs Office). This informed the initial liberal disbursement of funds to federal legislators for execution of constituency projects in their local communities. 13 years down the line, Nigerians in all the constituencies in the federation still groan with abject absence of all what the legislators are supposed to do with the fund they collect from the executive on behalf of their communities for execution of constituency projects. The fact of this dysfunction is that every federal legislator sees the constituency project fund as his own share from the yearly budget. Another observable malfeasance is that even when a legislator decides to as much as drill a water bore-hole in his constituency, he gives the contract to his company. It is therefore, a tragedy of a nation that a waste pipe such as constituency project fund allocation to legislators has still remained a lawful practice.Garba writes from Bauchi
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