Federal Budgets In Nigeria,1954-1999: A History Of The Processses, Polices And Problems

ABSTRACT

Economic historians in about the last forty years have laboured successfully to produce a rich body of literature on diverse aspects of the economic activities of the peoples and government of Nigeria. Their labour has covered areas of trade, transportation, arts and crafts within the formal and the informal sectors of the nation's economy. This notwithstanding, a wide gap still exists in the historiography of the economic history of Nigeria, particularly between the middle of the 1950s and the close of the last century. The most neglected aspects of this historiography are the public budgets and the general fiscal operations of the federal government on which nothing at present, has been written. This study is an attempt at closing this gap and of showing how the budget, an important instrument of economic planning, affected the course of the country's development in about the last fifty years The study has employed the interdisciplinary method of using the combined instruments of narration and analysis common to the Arts and the Social Sciences to illuminate the series of continuity and change in the budgetary practices of the different administrations that governed Nigeria from 1954 to 1999, by comparing and contrasting budgetary operations of the administrations in the respective periods. The study argues that the historical causation of the problems of development and modernisation lies in the failure of most of the administrations that ruled Nigeria at the centre, to evolve an appropriate budgetary technique and to adhere to the true tenets of fiscal federalism for the anchoring of their fiscal policies and objectives. This failure derailed budgetary objectives in the second half of the last century in Nigeria.