Journalists and public analysts have been hunting for details of the Rivers State 2016 budget (Nyesom Wike’s first budget) without success, but the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) now claims that the budget contains N15 billion allocated as security vote.
The party said in Port Harcourt at the weekend that the whopping security vote, a subhead that any governor uses as he pleased, must be reason why the budget was not available to members of the public.
Budget analysts and other journalists had conveyed their frustration in getting the 2016 budget to Austen Tam-George, commissioner of information and communication, at a media parley after Wike’s Supreme Court victory. The commissioner had promised to get the budget commissioner to make it available to newsmen, but that was yet to happen.
Now, the chairman of the APC in the state, Davis Ibiamu Ikanya, said at the weekend that the party had discovered the governor “allocated a whopping N15 billion to himself as security vote in the 2016 state budget.”
The issue of security vote had been a subject of controversy over the years, as the present government leaders had pelted the former governor, Chibuike Amaechi, for allocating huge votes to himself under security.
Now, the APC, which was formerly PDP, said: “It is pertinent to remind Rivers people that under Amaechi as governor, the highest annual security vote was N3 billion spread through the year or N250 million per month. Now, Governor Wike has decided to award himself N15 billion annual or N1.25 billion monthly security vote. We believe that the difference is very obvious to the people at this point.”
Ikanya said it was getting clearer why Wike fought hard to capture power in the state. “The curiosity of the APC was aroused when months after the budget was passed, it was tightly kept out of the reach or sight of Rivers people. The APC had to repeatedly make public its observation that Nyesom Wike deliberately concealed the details of the 2016 budget that was hurriedly passed by the Rivers State House of Assembly [RSHA] for obvious until a few days ago when a concerned former member of the RSHA leaked the budget details to the APC”.
The APC feared that in the months and years to come, more things would come up to reveal why the governor was bent on getting into Brick House, it had always suspected the intentions of those in government now. “We would have been surprised if the situation was different given the known antecedents of the governor when he Obio/Akpor Council chairman, Chief of Staff to former Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and as Minister for Education”.
The APC promised to carefully and critically scrutinize the 2016 Rivers State Budget in great detail and make public areas of concern in the budget in the interest of Rivers people.
