Civil Society, Democracy and Budgeting: Citizens Engagement and Transformations in Nigeria’s Budgeting (original) (raw)

Politikon, 2021

Abstract

Democracy in the sphere of policy-making warrants fulfilling the popular will by opening spaces for citizen knowledge of the governance processes participation, inclusion and a framework for accountability. The four budget stages of preparation, approval, implementation, and audit necessarily ought to integrate the above principles for an essential nexus with democracy. Using the work of two groups of civil society partners working on Nigeria’s budgeting, we studied the 2016–2019 period around the principles of democratic budgeting as well as explored changes related to civic engagements over the period. We found a monopoly of budget preparation by cloistered bureaucratic experts. The approval stage is marred by politics of vested interests in the legislature and executive with resulting delays in implementation and limited monitoring of the process by citizens. Budget audit suffers delays and non-response to its sensitive findings. Nonetheless, participatory civic engagements have ...

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