NIGERIA (Commonwealth Union) – There has been some budget reductions in the Kaduna area and the people are not happy. There is always going to be reduction of budgets with the way the world is going but the reductions should not come at the cost of the people. Which is exactly what the Kaduna state government did and the forum that represents the people of the Kaduna area are voicing their negative views and opinions on these cuts already.
The problem is that they have cut the budgets from education and health, which is ideally two areas the budgets should not be cut from. The town hall meeting where this was said had not been a good one as there was tension from the people. When the budget was being discussed it showed that 40% of the proposed budget was allocated to education and health.
Now 40% may seem like a massive amount of the budget but its nothing when you compare it to the two sectors. The fair way to go is to split the 40% into half and give each sector 20%. This is not enough to do anything in either. The director of the forum Aminu Banbangida stated very openly that this new figure was much lower than the figure they got last year.
He further stated that there will be rectifying actions taken later on as the government will have to take action and look at these cuts. He says that whilst there needs to be budget cuts so the country has money to survive these are not the two sectors to cut is from.
There were ongoing projects that needed the money and these projects could be the reason a life is saved or lost. These budget cuts will not help the on-going project in the sense that they would have to stop if there isn’t enough money.
At the press conference after the town hall meeting, he stated that “We are into advocacy on key issues like family planning and child killer deceases. We realised there was no cash backing this programme supported by DRPC PACFah@scale Budget.”
Governor Nasir El-Rufai was the second person in line at the press conference where he too was questioned about this budget cut. The governor also kept his cool and told the media “As a responsive government, we recognised early the need to engage citizens in every step of the governance process, and deliberately institutionalised town hall meetings as an avenue for citizens and government to engage, exchange ideas, co-create and obtain feedback. These roundtable approaches to governance have ensured that projects and policies of our government remain people-centre, especially in the spirit of Open Government Partnership, which was pioneered by Kaduna in Nigeria.”
