ABUJA— SENATOR Isaiah Balat has advocated an alternative approach to the war against corruption in order to boost confidence among the country’’s development partners after the setbacks arising from the recent third place corruption ranking of the country by Transparency International.
Senator Balat, chairman of the Senate Committee on Privatisation while lauding the implementation of the capital side of the 2004 budget in an analysis on the administration’’s 2005 budget proposals, however, faulted proposals for education, agriculture and power supply.
According to him the allocations to the sectors would not help the administration’’s laudable aims at economic empowerment of the citizenry.
Noting the futility of the present efforts in addressing the corruption menace in the country, the lawmaker said:”Our efforts to attract foreign investment are being constrained not only by security and infrastructure concerns, but by the endemic corruption that we seem unable to solve.”The current rating of Nigeria by Transparency International as the world’’s third most corrupt state does not give us cause to cheer. The two countries that are ““worse”” than Nigeria are of such sizes that in economic terms Nigeria is still the most corrupt country in the world That this problem keeps on recurring means that we are yet to tackle the actual causes of corruption in our country. we need to extend the public service reforms to include reducing the cost of doing business in Nigeria.””
Observing the allocation to agriculture and education in the budget, Senator Balat (PDP, Kaduna South) said that the government’’s commendable efforts towards transforming the country’’s economic potentials through the two sectors could be impaired through the allocations to the sectors.
““My submission is that the agriculture budget for 2005 is unlikely to achieve these given the paltry allocation of 1.65% of the budget to agriculture.””
Commenting further on the allocation to agriculture, Balat said:””Out of the N19.5 billion proposed for agriculture, just 48% is for capital expenditure, the bulk going for non-productive activities.””
Stressing that agriculture ought to be more regarded in the light of the large proportion of the citizen engaged in the sector, the lawmaker said:””We should be reminded that over 60% of our people are employed in agriculture, which contributes about 30% of our gross domestic product (GDP). It is in this sector that Wabara stand the greatest chance of creating new jobs, raising incomes and reducing poverty,” Senator Balat said.
On education, Senator Balat said that the decrease in capital allocation from 8% to 4% was ominous for the government’’s laudable goals set out in the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS).““It is disturbing that we have reduced the proportion of our capital budget that goes to education from 8% in 2000 to 4% in 2005. The laudable goals set out in the social contract of NEEDS are unlikely to be realized this way.
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