Osun, Ogun and Oyo states are notorious for budget secrecy

by Ajadi Daniel

These three states are the only states in the south west that does not have their budget in the open whether summary or in full details. A search through the internet will reveal other states’ budget in the south west; some of these budgets can be found on YMonitor as well as civic tech sites such as budgit.

But Oyo, Ogun, Osun states are notorious for budget secrecy. One would have expected that Ogun state due to her closeness to Lagos and the fact that it is fast becoming an Industrial capital will compel them to embrace open governance as well as an open data system.

The Oyo state budget for 2017 is N208bn, Osun 2017 budget is N146.6bn while Ogun state budget for 2017 stands at N221 billion. But these are just in the news. The details of their budget have not been disclosed. A call to budgit also revealed that they had written letters to these states for their budget, but all efforts were to no avail.

Osun state has no budget in the open, even the previous years’ budget, the last time Ogun has a budget in the open, was in 2013. Oyo state in 2015 has what look like a summary of the 2015 budget.

The implication of these is that no one can tell exactly what these states are spending on, except they disclose, their activities cannot be monitored or tracked in tandem with an available budget document to determine whether they are on track or not. In such situation, transparency becomes a myth, and accountability becomes unreal, the question is, if these states consider themselves accountable to the people, what are they accountable on?, a budget document that the citizens are ignorant on and cannot verify.