El-Rufai dares Dogara, publishes pay slip, security votes

Governor of Ka­duna State, Nasir El-Rufai, has re­leased details of the state’s expenditure, as well as its security votes.

This comes as a re­sponse to Speaker of the House of Representa­tives, Yakubu Dogara, who had called on Gov­ernors to release their ex­penditure.

A statement issued by El-Rufai’s spokesman, Samuel Aruwan, on Monday read: “Our at­tention has been drawn to a challenge by Hon. Yakubu Dogara, Speaker of the House of Rep­resentatives, calling on Kaduna State to make public its security votes and local government ex­penditure.

“This challenge was thrown as a response to Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s request to the national assembly (NASS) to pro­vide further details on the opaque N115 billion 2016 NASS budget. Malam Nasir El-Rufai welcomes this challenge as a neces­sary step to improve and strengthen our democ­racy and would like to re­spond as follows:

“The budgets of all state governments in Nigeria are detailed out and pre­sented at least under the headings of: a. personnel cost; b. overhead, and c. capital expenditure.”

“This is unlike the bud­get of the national assem­bly which is a single line item of over N100 billion that divulges zero infor­mation or details. NASS can at least break down its own single line budget into the hundreds of line items that are detailed in every state government budget in Nigeria. It is disingenuous to respond to every request for trans­parency by casting asper­sions.”

The governor added that Dogara would not have asked him to publish security votes if he had done his research “very well”.

He said last year his government published not just its own budget, but those of all the 23 lo­cal governments in the state.

“On our part, the Ka­duna state government has consistently made public all its budget de­tails. In 2016, in an un­precedented step, the state published not only its own budget, but also that of all the 23 local gov­ernment councils online on the www.openkaduna.com.ng website,” he said.

“The local government budgets provide details of the recurrent and capital spending of every single LG in a transparent man­ner. The proposed 2017 LG budgets, currently before the state assem­bly, are also already on­line on the same website, and on www.kdsg.gov.ng. Approved state bud­gets 2016-2017 can be found on http://open­kaduna.com.ng/Budget/approved-budget. We in­vite the right honourable speaker to download and peruse at his pleasure.”

“As regards Kaduna state security votes, once again, if the honourable speaker had run an on­line search he would have discovered the details of our spending priorities on security as a state gov­ernment. As our Kaduna Comprehensive Secu­rity Architecture (KAD­CoSA) outlines, the state is directing security spending on four pillars; justice, technology, com­munity engagement and support to security agen­cies.”-The Authority