(L-R) Christopher Ezeh, chairman; Reginald Ihejiahi, MD/CEO, Fidelity Bank Plc at the recent extra-ordinary general meeting of the bank in Lagos.

The nation’s Organised Private Sector (OPS) and other members of the business community have said that the 2011 budget will end up as a fiasco owing to the sloppy implementation that has characterised the Federal Budget in the past 11 years.
Although on paper, said the OPS, the budget looks good as it contains the necessary policies that can return the nation’s ailing economy to the part of sustainable growth, the desired objectives can scarcely be achieved because of poor implementation and corruption. They said  Nigerians, both corporate and individuals, no longer  have any expectation from the budget because they consider it a ritual.
The OPS comprising the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (Naccima), the Nigerian Employers Consultative Assembly (Neca) and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (Man), said unless the government decides to be sincere in the implementation this time around, Nigerians should not expect anything good from the 2011 budget.
In the 2011 budget, allocation to the National Assembly was slashed to N111.2 billion ($718 million) from N156 billion in 2010. About N108 billion is for recurrent expenditure, while N3.21 billion is for capital expenditure. Mr. Lamido Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said last month that lawmakers get a quarter of the government’s overhead budget. Dr Simon Okolo, the outgoing president of Naccima, which currently hosts the OPS secretariat, said  at the 50th annual general meeting of   the association that poor budget implementation has made Nigerians lose faith in the federal budget because nothing good comes out of it at the end of the fiscal year.
Okolo said that empirical results from studies have confirmed that era of pursuits of market reforms were characterised by improved incentives but failed to translate to increased credit to the real sector. Also, while growth was stifled during the era of controls, the reforms era was associated with rise in inflationary pressures.
Among the pitfalls of reforms identified by studies are faulty theoretical models for reforms and a host of conflicts emanating from adopted theoretical models for reforms and above all, frequent reversals and or non-sustainability of reforms.
According to the OPS, the studies noted the need to bolster reform through the deliberate adoption of policies that would ensure convergence of domestic and international rates of return on real sector investment. The current banking sector reform piloted by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is a mixed bag of blessings and misfortune for various stakeholders in the economy.