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Home»News»Nigeria News»Lagos ‘Open Budget Forum’ Calls Citizens To Action On Budget Monitoring
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Lagos ‘Open Budget Forum’ Calls Citizens To Action On Budget Monitoring

By orientalnewsngMay 24, 2017No Comments4 Mins Read
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Yemisi Izuora

Experts have spoken with one voice as they gathered at the one day, “Open Budget Forum” in Lagos, calling for concerted determination by citizens to monitor and track the implementation of the 2017 budget in Lagos state.

By so doing they would be in a position to hold the government to account, they said.

The forum organized under the Strengthening Citizens Engagement in Electoral Process (SCEEP) project implemented in Lagos by the International Press Centre, IPC, with the support of ACTIONAID Nigeria and the UKAID through the Department for International Development (DFID), provided the opportunity for stakeholders to share information that promotes accountability, citizens’ participation and by extension, good governance in the implementation of the 2017 budget of Lagos state.

In his opening remark at the event, Dr Tunde Oseni, Senior Lecturer and Head, Department of Politics and IR, Lead City University, Ibadan, said the initiative seeks to deepen budget literacy and enhance citizen and community participation in budget preparation and implementation.

Oseni described budgeting as a universal exercise that is ideally a statement of action and a fiscal policy on how to raise money and how to spend it and could ordinarily be seen as an annual proposal of revenue and expenditure both capital and recurrent.

Commending the process of the Lagos state budget 2017, he said, “For instance, Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State presented a budget proposal of N812.998 billion to the State House of Assembly on November 29, 2016 for approval. The House passed the budget bill into law on January 3, 2017.

The budget has a total capital expenditure of N507.817 billion and a recurrent expenditure of N305.182 billion. The total revenue was estimated at N642.848 billion with a deficit financing of N170.151 billion. The 2017 budget is tagged the ‘Golden Jubilee Budget’.  It seems to be a neat one no padding”.

Going further Oseni counselled that beyond the figures and facts as well as graphs and charts, that it is important that budgets reflect the needs of the people and contain their inputs.

He said for purpose of accountability and citizens participation, when monies are ‘earmarked’ for programmes and projects, they must also be ‘eyemarked’.

According to him, The general perception in Nigeria is that budget is never truly open. It lacks transparency, accountability, and openness. Today’s forum is therefore expected to untangle the challenges of opaque budgets as a way of making them transparent and work for the people.

Speaking further he said, There are both technical and practical sides to budgeting. In other words there are both top-down and bottom-up approaches to budget formulation. Citizens’ participation is relative. The fact that we operate democracy means that certain responsibilities are better handled by a few people our representatives. They are however elected to think and act with us and not for us. Given the nature of humans, we will always want the lion share of everything.

Bureaucrats and politicians are thus positioned to ensure that things go round. Communities must get fair shares of what is available for the state. This is the more reason why we need a synergy of the bottom-up approach (aggregating and taking care of the people’s needs) and top-down strategy (rationalizing the people’s needs).

In his remarks, director of the IPC, Lanre Arogundade said that the forum was designed to further explore various channels through which the participation of citizens in the budget process can be enhanced.

“This initiative is in consonance with global interest in making government open and one way of achieving this is by allowing citizens to participate and have full access to the budget including its breakdown.

A full access to the budget by citizens will allow for a proper monitoring of the implementation of the budget especially at the grassroots level and give citizens the opportunity to call the attention of the government to projects that are not implemented but were included in the budget” Arogundade asserted.

He expected that the forum would enhance the relationship between the Lagos State government and grassroots communities in the development process, especially so that community members can play desired roles in the implementation of projects by agencies of government in their communities.

Arogundade, appreciated the support of ACTIONAID and UKAID for the opportunity to implement the SCEEP project which has now extended beyond the original citizens engagement with the electoral process to capacity building on budget watch and now this open budget forum.

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