The All Progressives Congress in Rivers State in reacting to the passage of the Appropriate Bill 2023 by the Rivers State House of Assembly as ridiculously hasty.
According to APC Spokesperson in the state, Mr. Darlington Nwauju, the Appropriation Act 2023, is a document that lacks the fundamental ingredient of collective decision-making and cannot be said to be a people’s budget.
Mr. Nwauju noted that ideally, a budget should be democratic, fair, accountable, transparent, and strategic, querying the procedure for nomination of projects captured in the budget.
“When were the people of Rivers State invited for public hearings by the State Assembly or town hall meetings to highlight sectorial priority?
How were the people from the 23 local government areas carried along in the decision of what should come to them and what is the budget performance of the 2022 budget?
This is the reason why we continue to say that something as important as the Budget of a state should not get the sort of poor visibility and accessibility ours has been getting in the past 7yrs and unfortunately the very last budget of this administration has suffered the same fate of opaqueness and elitism”.He stressed.
Speaking further, the Spokesperson stated that the 2023 budget document of Rivers State is unaccountable, non-transparent, and deceitful only targeting opening up for the wealth of Rivers State to be misappropriated.
”The only information we hear is that the Budget was jacked up from #550 to #555billion naira”.
He called on Rivers people to interrogate the 2023 Appropriation Act as passed by the State Assembly as the budget should be able to explain to Rivers people the total amount recovered from the shortfalls in 13% derivation accruals paid by the Federal Government in the 4th quarter of 2021 and 1st quarter of 2022 and the over #60billion expected balance from the Federal Government.
