Civil Society Organization and Media Practitioners in Rivers State have called for open budget to improve transparency and accountability.
The call was made at the weekend at the Social Action Office at D/Line as CSO and the media meet to collaborate on Open Budget Campaign. Comrade Ken Henshaw the Coordinator of the programme “open Budget Campaign” said the CSO, media round table is pertinent to budget implementation in the Niger Delta states which is very worrisome especially as the 2015 budget was one of the worst in its implementation in the area of Education, Health and Food sufficiency.
He stated that budget at the federal level is contradictory and inadequate while the state budget is a great disaster because of its 5% performance.
Comrade Hensaw explained that the budget of every state is a public document and citizens must participate but regretted that over the years government in the past has treated the budget document with atmost secrecy and this has prevented its citizens from full participation while tasking the present administration to make the budget open where citizens can have access to, for proper documentation, transparency and evaluation as part of good governance and budget monitoring.
He called for pre-budget document presentation to the people and not the way it is done by presenting to House of Assembly and in few days the budget been signed into law.
The CSO also explained that budget as a public document needs to be released early so that each sector can appreciate and know government’s projections and the capital projects for the year.
Explaining further, he stated that the media must collaborate with the CSO to drive the process in canvassing for an open budget for easy monitoring of its projects nothing that no society and country can run in a way where budget documents are not known or seen by its citizenry.
He told participants that the blame rest on the door step of members of the House of Assembly, Commissioners, Permanent Secretaries, Economists, business and the political class, CSO and the public for not demanding for an open budget.
On the way forward, Comrade Henshaw stated that he has sent the report of the budget monitoring to the government but lamented on its poor performance particularly the 2015 budget on only three key areas of health, agriculture and education while commenting that the modern primary schools built by the Amaechi’s administration make rooms for more people to enroll in private schools saying that the aim has already been defeated.
Others who contributed on the issue called for wider publicity by the media, collaboration with the government, provision of scholar budget circular and synergy between the media and CSO
It would be recalled that the budget, monitoring platform has been in existence since 8 years and the issue of budget at the local government councils in the state has become a taboo. ###
Pius Dukor
