The future could be brighter if we make small adjustments

Hello Folks,
Much water has passed under the bridge since my last post. I shall remain focused and only address my niche area here and hopefully comment on other issues in the appropriate forums. The road to my church I spoke about in my last post has surprisingly been fixed…not the usual patch-up work but a thorough rehab. I watched the procedure, and I am perfectly convinced that it will stand many rainy seasons in the future (I mean the fixed sections). Vehicles now speed past the once impassable road like a highway.

The problem with the Nigerian system, in my assessment, is that the fiscal year is skewed in such a way that it runs from January to December. A new budget is usually passed to take effect from the 1st of January and terminate by 30th December of every year. This means that a fair amount of the dry season is used to jaw-jaw about a new budget in which period outdoor projects should intensively be going on.
If we take into consideration the geography, indeed the best model for a fiscal year should be one that starts on the 1st of July and ends on the 30th of June of every year. This way we would use much of the rainy season to plan, present, defend, debate and then pass the Appropriation Bills as they are properly called.

Implementation of this financial plan would then commence in July and in about 2 months all pre-contract procedures will have been completed and outdoor projects may kick-off as the dry season sets in. Invariably this would allow project implementation to utilize the full span of the dry weather period instead of the current situation whereby outdoor projects hardly use up to 3 months dry period every year.

The country is tinkering with its 31 year old constitution handed down to the polity by past military dictators as we speak, and they will do well to incorporate this change into it. Outdoor project implementation will benefit immensely from this proposed regime and then the much talked about infrastructure gap will be filled. The current practice whereby legislators receive budget proposals in December, after which they proceed on Christmas and New Year break, and return to pass the Bills anytime deep into the 1st quarter of the New Year, is a terrible waste of scarce dry weather.

This is the main reason why projects awarded to contractors which usually would last for 10 to 12 months construction time, end up hanging for more than 6 years, and most of them abandoned due to the fact that much dilapidation had already occurred to erode the integrity of the earlier milestones achieved. Will the politicians see this anomaly? Let’s hope they read published materials such as this.