Amid allegations of states’ chief executives inducing lawmakers to hastily pass appropriation bills, there is need for lawmakers to be painstaking in their perusal of these documents to justify the critical importance of budgets to their economies, and reinforce the independence of the State Houses of Assembly, SEYE OLUMIDE and AYODELE AFOLABI report.
As processes for the passage of 2025 fiscal appropriation by the 36 states’ Assemblies get underway anytime soon, critical stakeholders are questioning the rationale behind the hasty passage of the 2024 Appropriation Bills into law within a few weeks, especially with little or no recourse to large deficits that arose from the 2023 budgets.
A report by the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) indicated that two weeks to the end of 2023, 32 state governors presented their proposed 2024 fiscal plans, which amounted to N14.04 trillion, while a report from the Debt Management Office (DMO) revealed a cumulative N5.862 trillion debts in the 2023 budgets across states.
This development has again thrown up debates over the independence of the legislative arms of government at the sub-national level. While most stakeholders opine that what is happening confirms the rubber stamp appellation slammed on these assemblies by many Nigerians, others insist that until the country is appropriately restructured, the executive arm will continue to wield more power, lord over states’ assemblies, and undermine the autonomy of other arms of government.
Despite the 1999 Constitution making ample room for Separation of Powers and granting certain forms of autonomy to the three arms of government, the overbearing influence that governors have over the legislative arm in various states does not support the position of the constitution.
Be that as it may, the hasty passage of 2024 Appropriation Bills across states may have further justified the sentiment that legislative arms in states are mere pawns in the hands of the governors.
However, one of the grouses held by many against the hasty passage of the 2024 Appropriation Bills is that these Assemblies perhaps danced to the tunes of the executive arms thereby failing to carry out due diligence on the all-important fiscal appropriation.
Some even alleged that some state governors induced the legislators to hurriedly pass the budgets with minor or no alterations, and without being painstaking in their perusal of the voluminous documents as a way of justifying the critical importance of budgets to their economies, and financial year.
While most Appropriation Bills were returned to the governors the way that they were presented to the lawmakers, only a few states like Jigawa State saw legislators slashing what the executive sent to them, and increasing what they felt should be improved upon.
In Lagos State, where the 2024 Appropriation Bill was presented around mid-December 2023, hastily passed within two weeks, and signed into law on January 15, 2024, a lawmaker, who does not want his name in print, said that the Mudashiru Obasa-led House of Assembly managed to follow all the House rules before passing the bill into law, including calling for a public hearing and summoning the various ministries and MDAs to defend their budgets.
But dissatisfied pundits are still baffled by the speed in which the Appropriation Bill was passed, stressing that the Assembly spent less than 22 days excluding the period that it went on break to work on the bill.
In Ogun State, Governor Dapo Abiodun presented a N703 billion bill to the Assembly, on November 28, 2023, and it was passed into law on December 28, and subsequently signed into law on December 29.
The Ekiti State government presented its Appropriation Bill to the state Assembly on September 13 and it was signed into law on December 23, 2023.After Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde, presented an N434 billion Appropriation Bill to the House on December 5, it was passed, and signed into law on December 20, and 22, 2023 respectively.
The same scenario played out across the South-East, where in Abia State, Governor Alex Otti presented a budget of N567.2 billion, on December 12, 2023, and it was passed into law by the Assembly on December 22, and subsequently assented by the governor on December 28.
In Zamfara State, the governor presented the bill to the Assembly on December 21, and it was passed into law on December 29, and signed on December 31. A similar scenario played out in Kebbi State, where the governor presented the 2024 Appropriation Bill to the lawmakers on November 22, it was passed, and signed into law on December 21, a period of less than a month.
In Jigawa State, the governor presented the Appropriation Bill to the judiciary on November 14, and it was passed on December 21, and signed into law on December 28, 2023.
In Katsina State, the executive presented a budget of N543.3 billion on November 21 to the state, and it was passed on December 20, and consequently signed into law all within the space of 30 days.
In Kano, the Appropriation Bill was presented to the Assembly on October 27 and it was passed on December 20. The governor signed it into law on December 28, while in Kaduna, the bill was presented to lawmakers on December 18, it was passed and signed before the end of the same month.
In Rivers State, only four lawmakers passed the 2024 Appropriation Bill, which was presented by the executive on December 13. Rivers, Imo, Kaduna, Plateau, Niger, Zamfara Adamawa, Delta, and Abia assemblies spent between one day to two weeks scrutinising the bills before they were passed, this is despite the huge indebtedness of about N 1,29 trillion inherited from their last budgets.
For a former spokesman to the erstwhile speaker of Lagos State House of Assembly, Lanre Odubote, while no law compels a state Assembly to spend a certain period of days before passing a bill into law, the executives that submitted the bills late to the should not be without blame.
However, he explained: “What may have culminated into the speedy passage of the 2024 Appropriation Bills by state Assemblies could be as a result of what happened between former President Muhammadu Buhari, and the Bukola Saraki-led Senate in 2016, when the All Progressives Congress (APC)-controlled National Assembly, could not sign the year’s budget into law until May 2016 because of the rift between the Buhari-led executive and the Senator Bukola Saraki-led Senate.”
He said that the ruling party has since then vowed to maintain and sustain the January-December fiscal year. While cautioning against a repeat of the hasty passage of fiscal plans as was witnessed last year in 2025, the Financial Secretary of Kaduna Maternal Accountability Mechanism (KADMAM), Bako Abdul Usman, said it was baffling that the Kaduna State Assembly, had to hurriedly pass the bill presented to it by Governor Uba Sani, in less than 15 days.
He said even though the hasty signing of the budget showed that the government may have sustained the January-December fiscal calendar, on the other hand, the hurried process raises huge concerns.
Usman, who contended that the budget is too important to be rushed without the needed painstaking checks and balances by the legislature, wondered what time the Assembly took to review the 240-page proposed budget side-by-side with the economic and fiscal update, fiscal strategy paper, and policy statement alignment, just as he queried the average time frame the Assembly took to drill the MDAs during the committee defense.
He alleged that the Assembly hardly spent time studying and considering submissions from civil society groups during the public hearing, adding that the perception that the various Assemblies were mere “rubber stamps” to the executive was justified based on the manner that the 2024 Appropriation Bills were hurriedly passed into law.
Also, a Professor of Finance at the Federal University Oye Ekiti (FUOYE), Babatunde Afolabi, described the hasty passage of 2024 budgets across states as an indication that the legislative arm of government is more like an appendage of the executive. He said the lawmakers’ inability to scrutinise the budgets was as a result of the flawed process through which the majority of the lawmakers emerged.
“These lawmakers were either handpicked by the governors or the leadership of their parties. They therefore cannot do a thorough job with the budget,” he said.
A public affairs analyst from Ekiti State University Ado Ekiti (EKSU), Gbenga Jegede, described budgeting processes in the country’s legislative arms as lamentable and an absurdity taken too far.
“The passages of the 2024 budgets both at the National and state Assemblies fell short of the acceptable standard all over the world. How do you pass a budget without looking at the budget performance of the previous year? How do you pass the budget without inviting the people and even MDAs that would implement the budget to a public hearing to know their needs as opposed to what a governor presented?” Jegede queried.
Speaking on the huge domestic debt portfolios across states, a legal practitioner, Femi Olajide said: “Unlike the National Assembly, which started probing the N30 trillion debt by former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, nothing was heard from the Assemblies on the huge debts incurred by past administrations or the incumbent governors arising from the 2023 budgets.”
Against the backdrop that most state assemblies lack financial autonomy, and where it exists, it is hardly implemented, a former House of Representatives member, Bernard Mikko, said the fact that those appropriation bills were passed into law within the shortest possible time is just one of the factors that make the state legislative arms rubber stamps.
Mikko, who represented Khana/Gokana Federal Constituency of Rivers State from 1999 to 2003, continued: “What makes the parliament a rubber stamp is the way those legislators were handpicked by party leaders from the ward levels to the primaries, and the election into the House, and the unrestricted influences of either the president and or state governors to determine principal officers of the legislative arms. It doesn’t matter the time spent to scrutinise the budget, as long as no House rule is violated or skipped in the process, it is an open-ended time for the Assembly to pass the budget.”
He said that legislative oversight functions are where Assemblies have failed and where the media should focus.
To Odubote: “Except the media is trying to set an agenda, I don’t see anything changing until the entire governing system is restructured. The executive is just too powerful, even where the opposition controls the majority in the legislature, which is almost a rare case in this country, the power wielded by a president or governor is too enormous. This current practice cannot change anything.”
But taking a different position, a former lawmaker, Senator Femi Okurounmu, who represented Ogun Central (1999-2003), said what took place during the passage of the 2024 Appropriation Bills, right from the National Assembly to the 36 House of Assemblies, further indicated that the present presidential system would, one day ruin Nigeria if it is not changed.
He said: “If we fault the National Assembly, what about the governors? As far as the president or governor succeeds in determining who the principal officers of the parliament are, or in determining who gets what position in the legislative, the passage of an Appropriation Bill is the least a president or governor can easily push through.”
He said even though, there are no standing rules or laws that stipulate a timeframe that the budget must stay in the parliament before it is passed, “the procedure is when the bill is presented to the Assembly, it goes to the various committees, which in turn invite all the ministries, MDA’s and other relevant bodies to defend their budgets.
“After this, the various committees return their findings to the Assembly and other procedures. In this situation, due diligence would be difficult to achieve within one month, not to say one or two weeks. What happened to the 2024 budgets was a charade across states’ assemblies. And that is one of the reasons the economy is unstable,” he said.
