Revealed: Budget Padding ,The Civil Servants Are Not To Be Blamed

I was happy to be taken into the world of point of view from a brilliant Nigerian comrade who gave an insight into how budget are made and possible source of compromise into our National Budget that have received a lot of bashing and critics most falling on the shoulder of the civil servants believed to have doctored the paddings.

I was compelled to believe Someone must and should invegate how the budget was prepared, This morning It is painning me that everyone is blaming civil servants when this job was giving to consultants, who brought an excel template, did little or no Training, gave it to civil servants to use, who in turn submitted to them and instead of them to clean it up just padded it and submitted it.

There is a coding error, which I pointed out during one of the sessions. I have worked with this kind of template in the private sector. After coding individual items, they still went further to code Total and they say that’s how they are taught. What this does is that it results in figure inflation in the total of linked sheets, this is very practical. A budget proposal of lets say 500m will appear as 800m in the total due to wrong coding and such will seem as if, 300m was hiding somewhere and they’ll never find it, except we remove the double codings.

A budget of information can appear in State house due to wrong coding too. It was a complex excel sheet at least for civil servants that hardly know Jack shit about computers this is why we need a well trained computer literate civil serviceI knew from the word go when I saw the template that there will be a problem for a largely computer illiterate civil Service.

Government is blaming the wrong people for the error, let me tell you, you seenthose consultants handling the budget were lodged in Sheraton and govt is not admitting that they engaged consultants who reports directly to God knows who.

 The consultants didn’t even understand their own template. I saw that From the word go and this is what caused this budget mess because once you miss a code , it’s all going bunkers.

Civil servants are the critical link in governance between government and people but at the same time it’s a weak link. They contract out their jobs and turn around to blame them for not doing anything, call them lazy, good for nothing and still heap the blame on them  the contractors mess up. I also used to think of them like that until I see how things are done in the service. Do you know they buy heir own ink and papers to work and print? They use their personal computers as well.

But don’t let’s us digress. What I need is someone that can help refocus the mind of Nigerians that the civil servants might be innocent after all?

-Did government engage consultants? Yes or No.?

-Did they bring an excel template unknown to the civil Service? Yes or no

–Did they do proper training?

 -What was the modus operandi of the preparation of the budgets in different MDAs, to submitting to the consultants and to govt?

-What roles exactly did those consultants play in the budget saga? Who engaged them. Who paid them?

-Did they work solely or in conjunction or connivance with the civil servants?

-Many questions to be asked I think they are not telling the president the truth.

  According to a close source in one of the Ministry without Error or Padding he said

This is exactly what do I think, Yes. But not in this budget case. However, we did due diligence and double checked. That’s why my dept didn’t have a problem. I helped correct the error before going to the national Assembly.

There as a lot of error from the consultants and many ministry didnt know this.