Dakuku Peterside, others carpet Wike on N470bn budget

Director-General, Nigerian Maritime and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dakuku Peterside, who was a contestant in the 2015 governorship election in Rivers State, has joined in criticism of the N470 billion budget announced by Governor Nyesom Wike for 2017.

The budget has capital provision of N329 billion and recurrent of N141.1 billion in a 70/30 ratio, but has a deficit of up to N80 billion that may be covered by borrowing, while salaries and overhead shot up to N11.5 billion per month from N9 billion in 2016. It expects N220 billion from federal allocation whereas the state got an average of N10 billion per month or N120 billion for the year.

Reacting, Peterside said the 2017 budget did not have anything new and was lacking in content and ingenuity, especially as nobody in Rivers State had seen a copy of the 2016 budget. “The budget speech shows no direction the government wants to go, no new policy, no new initiative and nothing to show that the governor means what he is saying,” according to Peterside.

Peterside, who stated this in an interview with newsmen at the Port Harcourt International Airport, wondered how the governor could have rated himself on 2016 budget performance when it was only him that had the signed copy in the entire state.

According to him, “only the governor can wake up and score himself. Commissioners in his cabinet do not have 2016 budget, Assembly members do not have the signed budget, and several attempts by Rivers people to see the budget have met brick wall, even when the governor himself could not produce a copy when asked in a live radio programme.

“How then can we assess his performance, how do we know what was in the budget and how much was budgeted for each ministry, department and agency, how do we track what has been done and not executed? The Governor has made our state a laughing stock.”

The former National Assembly member questioned the governor’s Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) target “in the face of his own-engineered insecurity that has made businesses to leave the state in droves,” pointing out that it was obvious the governor lacked the capacity to implement the budget.

“His budget speech confirms high level of insecurity in the state engineered by him. With the governor claiming a budget of N15 billion for security in 2017, it proves what we have always said that the state is in reverse gear due to the reckless activities of the governor, who himself has compromised security on several occasions.

“More laughable is the fact that this is the same governor who boasted he would no longer fund security agencies in the state and we hope he is not planning to set up his own private security by arming his thugs. How will he spend the N15 billion without working with the security agencies?”

While describing the proposed empowerment and intervention programmes in the 2017 budget as mere cosmetic exercise, he said the governor had now realised the importance of education, which he once looked in disdain.

“The allocation to education is interesting, given that the immediate past government spent a lot on educational infrastructure over eight years and has set a very wonderful record, a feat that will take Wike forever to accomplish. Interestingly, nobody knows what the governor budgeted for education in 2016, so it is difficult to even assess him based on the parameters he set for himself,” he stressed

Peterside queried the current debt profile of the state, which he described as frightening and observed that there was no provision for servicing the debts in the proposed 2017 budget.

He admitted that giving a greater percentage of the budget to capital projects was a step in the right direction, but had his fears about sincerity of the governor to implement the items given that he did not show realistically how he intended to fund the budget.

He said Rivers people must rise up and hold this government accountable before it destroyed the state.
Ken Henshaw of Social Action had all through 2016 pelted the state government for not making available the signed copy of the 2016 budget, saying it fell short of transparency standards.