Journal Sustaining Innovative

A good number of Nigerians appear shocked by what they consider less-than-desirable quality of the proposed 2016 budget. Whether they are right or wrong, it seems that the 2016 budget proposal is dotted with tales of priority misalignments as well as supposedly ample evidences of poor post-design review/evaluation in many of its pages. This piece neither attempts to evaluate nor assesses the quality of the 2016 proposed budget. Nevertheless, it asks one question in that respect: what could have been responsible for all those short comings observed in the proposal?

Successfully, making national economic budgets requires first and foremost good understanding of the vision and goals of the government in power. This knowledge has to include the specific attendant fiscal activities already (or should be) drawn up for the purposes of realizing those goals particularly within the year in question. By extension, reasonable understanding of macroeconomic policy and public choice economics as it applies to our socio-economic circumstances is very important. That notwithstanding, it is also needless to say that a university degree in economics is not required for anyone to possess these budget making skills. Apart from economics, the second critical skill here is some working knowledge of project management which enables the designers and budget modelers to realistically track and estimate costs of budget items. Oftentimes, this skill is mashed with basic or cost accounting knowledge, but the gap is usually evident when one of the skills is lacking. The third and extremely important of these is the forensic data analytics skills which combines within it strong statistical capabilities and the ability to query the budget data, fish out inconsistencies, make more realistic statistical estimates where needed and ensure better budget by the end of the day. To what extent were these skills present in the makers of the proposed budget?