Female Journalist On Rivers Budget

Clarice Azuatalam, Female Journalist On Rivers Budget

ON the evening of December 24, 2008, just as many people were in a festive mood, the Rivers state Governor, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Amaechi rushed to the state house of assembly to present the 2009 Appropriation Bill.

In the budget, he proposed to spend a total sum of N432.2 billion for the current financial year. But what he proposed last year was N280.01 billion and this was presented to the house of assembly in February 2008. This amount he initially proposed was later increased by N97 billion or 34.6 percent when the state legislators eventually passed the appropriation bill of last year. At the end the state government had N377.5 billion in its kitty to spend.

However, looking at the current appropriation bill for the year 2009 the governor sent to the state house of assembly for approval, some financial experts have faulted it saying that “it lacks the standard style of budget preparation.”

For instance, Mr Chinedu Emeh, an economist told The Nation that “starting from the manner the budget was presented to the house of assembly and even the whole budget statement shows that it lacked expert advice.”

Emeh first wondered why the hurry to present the budget on the eve of Christmas and added that “to me the whole budget statement was more of speech-making than making financial statement on how the revenue and expenditure pattern of the state will look like this year.”

The economist also faulted the budget on not reflecting sectoral allocation and what is due to each ministry pointing out that the governor did not also indicate what is to be expended on miscellaneous, which is the standard practice.

Making his own critique, Mr Efegadi Eguzozie, a Port Harcourt based Financial Analyst who also runs a consultancy firm said “first, the budget is not christened anything, which is an indication that it was a job done in a hurry and by people who are not experts in the field.”

Eguzozie also faulted the budget on the grounds that it lacks the three basic ingredients of budget which are: participation, transparency and accountability.

According to him, participation means that all stakeholders like civil societies, women and youth groups ought to have made inputs into the budget, to state what they want or how they want the budget to be.

By transparency, it means that government has to be open on budget issues while accountability makes it imperative for government to give report on performance of the past budget on quarterly, half yearly or end of year basis.

Though the Financial Consultant commended the governor for adding the N104.2 billion unspent fund from the 2008 appropriation bill to the N328 billion( to get the N432.2 billion he proposes to spend this year) but he quickly pointed out that the sources of generating the revenue he proposed to spend this year were not indicated.

The sources, he stated are usually from VAT, Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) and federal allocation and may be grants.

Eguzozie further disclosed that the state is already experiencing short fall in its IGR since it changed its non- indigenous tax consultant to an indigene of the state. For instance, he said that the IGR for last year stood at N3.25 billion as against N6 billion which it had been receiving before the change.

The amount gulped by each sector, the ministries and their parastatals in the last year’s budget was not indicated in the financial statement sent to the state assembly

He further faulted the 2009 appropriation bill for not giving the detailed performance rating of the last year’s adding that “the whole budget has no focus on what it intends to achieve.”

In addition, the financial expert wondered why the difference between the last year’s recurrent expenditure and that of this year has to be only 2percent increase. That is, recurrent expenditure for 2009 is N90.6 or 21 percent of the total estimate for the year while that of last year had N53.408 billion or 19.07 percent of what was proposed for that period.

He also raised eyebrow on the difference between what was budgeted for capital projects last year and that of the current year. For last year, the amount expended on capital projects was N226.672 or 80.93 percent while that of this year is N341.6 billion or 79 percent of the total estimated for 2009. This, he noted has a slight drop of about 2 percent stating that “the whole figures look like they were just juggled to score some points.”

He in addition lamented that since 1999, the Finance Commissioners have not been giving budget break down except in the first year of Dr Peter Odili’s administration stressing that “some of these things I have pointed out to you are the reasons for budget apathy because the bill is presented in a way that is not really understood by the people.”

ENDS

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