Lack of citizens Interest, poor budget performance affecting budget performance – Steve Salawu


 

A media consultant and Communication specialist, Steve Salawu has attributed poor Budget Performance to lack of interest of citizenry in the budget processes and weak monitoring mechanism by critical mass of the people.

 

Salawu who spoke on Wednesday as a facilitator at a two day training workshop on Budget Tracking & Reporting for about 30 journalists in Lokoja, the Kogi state capital.

He identified Poor procurement platforms that would ensure transparency in procurement of equipments as well as assigning projects to incapable hands as militating factors to budget not living up to expectations over the years

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The training workshop was Organised by the Stallion Times Media services in collaboration with MacArthur Foundation as part of Get Involved, Dialogue and Improvement Project GDRIP.

Earlier, the Project Coordinator of Stallion Times, Isiyaku Ahmed said that the aim of the training was to build the capacity of journalists on budget processes and procedures, train journalists on how to track and report constituency projects and develop and write investigative story ideas on constituency projects.

In a presentation,Mr Henry Omokaiye stressed the need for journalists to monitor constituency projects so as to allow for the people to feel the presence of government in their constituencies.

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Omokhaye noted that proper budget monitoring by Journalists, will enables policies, programs and projects to be captured in the budget by the Government to meets the yearnings and aspirations of the people and to ensure that they are delivered to the fullest.

Omokaiye explained further that proper budget monitoring, helps to entrench accountability as well as in assessing budget performance of projects and programs.

He equally said budget monitoring by Journalists would ensure that resources are equitably distributed in a fair and equitable manner, adding that it also helps to direct the policy priorities of government.

While noting that the idea of constituency projects was for constituency to have the presence of government in every community, he said “the concept of constituency projects began in 1999, is to ensure a minimum presence of government in every constituency by having some grassroots projects sited in each, during a budget process”.

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