The Rivers State Governor, Rt. Hon. Rotimi Amaechi has charged Ministries, Departments, Parastatals and Agencies to ensure transparency and accountability in budget delivery, noting that the days of estimated and guess work in budgeting is over. Governor Amaechi gave the charge during the opening ceremony of a three week training programme organized by the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning in partnership with M-R International (Nig) Limited with the theme; “2014 Pre-Budget Orientation and Sensitization workshop on Budget planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation” in Port Harcourt.
The Governor noted that 74 per cent of last year’s budget was achieved as at September and promised that the remaining 26 per cent of the budget will be accomplished before end of the year. He advised all MDA’s to create a small department that should monitor how money being budgeted is spent to avoid embezzlement and also analyse previous budgets in order to deliver a well prepared budget. “There is no success in government without monitoring and evaluation and there is no budget without monitoring” Governor Amaechi said.
Speaking, the Commission of budget and Economic Planning, Mr. Gogo Levi Charles noted that before now there was difficulty in gathering data for budget implementation, stressing that the challenge faced in the State budget, was lack of transparency in budget planning. The Commissioner further stressed that with the new budgetary scheme, there is greater control of aggregate expenditures and the unification of harmonization of coding, budgeting, accounting and reporting system.
