The Minority Leader of the Plateau state House of Assembly, Hon Ibrahim Gyangdem, has expressed worries over the alleged poor implementation of the 2019 budget of the state, saying it was, “not encouraging.”
Hon Gyangdem lamented at the plenary Tuesday that people of the state have moved to Bauchi state to access medical and other services because they could not them in the state.
According him, though the APC administration has done well in the areas of peace and security, but he regretted that “none of our state owned government hospitals has a single city scanning machine to examine patients.
“Our people have had to move to Bauchi state to access medical services. Our children are seatting on bare floor in our public schools,” he said urging the house should find ways of ensuring proper performances of the 2020 budget.
Hon Ibrahim Baba Hassan, who supported the minority leader, he said, “I lost about 30 of my constituents going to hospital in Bauchi,” but also faulted the lawmakers of not doing proper oversight functions.
“Many of our committees do not carry out oversight functions of the ministries and departments and so we should not only criticise the executive.”
Hon Yahaya Mavo, frowned at non allocation of over head to ministries and departments of the Plateau State Government.
He said: “No ministry or department would function properly without over head releases, even the office of the Secretary to the Government of the State, even that of the Deputy Governor,”
The House of Assembly Committee on Information has frowned at the meagre allocation of N1b to the state information ministry in the 2020 budget proposal, by Governor Simon Lalong.
He said: “In a budget size of more than N172-bn, only N1-bn was captured for the ministry is meagre and in the next budget consideration should be made up for the ministry.”
He said in the next budget there will need for serious negotiations to see that more funds are allocated to the ministry.
He added that the budget size that captured N15-bn for the ministry of water resources and energy, is commendable, adding that it is also important to ensure that the educational sector which was allotted N10-bn representing 14 percent, need to be looked into more serious to attained the 24 percent global standard.
The Speaker Rt Hon Abok Nuhu, said the budget is now the rightful document of the house, urging the members to seriously work during the budget defence.
“As members of the 9th assembly we will do our best to scrutinise the budget and get the perfect document for implementation,” he said.
