By Dipo Olowookere
Out of the 36 states of the federation, only 10 of them have made their approved budgets for the year 2018 available for members of the public to see.
This information was revealed by BudgIT, Nigeria’s civic tech organisation raising the standards of transparency, citizen engagement and accountability most especially in public finance.
On its Twitter page on Friday morning, the organisation disclosed that, “There are only 10 states with public budgets [in Nigeria].
“Is your state among them? Can you call out your Governor to provide details of the budget to the PUBLIC?”
Revealing the 10 states that have published their proposed spending for the 2018 financial year, the group gave the names as Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Kaduna, Katsina, Kogi, Kwara, Ondo, Plateau and Yobe States.
For a while, BudgIT has been asking for transparency in the execution of the appropriation bills of states in the country.
Other platforms have also joined in calling on state governments to make their approved budgets available to the citizens because they have the right to know how their funds are used.
Particularly, the Lagos State government has been asked to show leadership in putting its budget for all to see.
Efforts to use the much-celebrated Freedom of Information (FoI) Bill to force Lagos State government to do this have proved abortive.
How the state government executive its budgets has been left in secrecy and there are no assurance that residents of the nation’s economy capital, which plans to be one of the best cities in the world, would soon know how government carry out its budget.
Adedapo Adesanya