Ajadi Daniel
YMonitor is currently running an open budget campaign. In our recent findings published on our website, 19 out of the 36 states of the federation have no history of open budget, in other words they have no history of budget transparency. Our findings also showed that 11 states have poor history of making their budget public.
The 19 states with no history of open budget are Adamawa, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kastina, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Osun, Oyo, Plateau, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe, Borno, Zamfara, Gombe. These States with no history of making their budget public were put in this category because their budget was not found on their official website, some of these states do not even have functioning official websites, and most of them don’t even have their budgets in other online platforms. Most of the states in this category don’t have any of their budgets including the previous years on any online platform.
The best these states would have done is to have their budget published on their website. But it must be because they do not care about budget transparency and possibly because their people have never engaged them on this or demand that the budget be made public,that is why they had not done anything about making their budgets known.
While 19 states have no history of budget publicity, Only 4 out of the 36 states in the country could be regarded as fair when it comes to budget publicity, these states are Abia, Delta, Ekiti, and Lagos.
These states were regarded as fair because their budget could be seen in one or two online platform, though they are not consistent with the open budget principle, some of these states operate a system that allows them to only make public a summarized version of their budget, something they call abridged, Lagos and Delta are good example. Lagos would have joined the likes of Kaduna if she was consistent with her own system.
Lagos has on her site a section for abridged and full budget from 2008 to 2016. But the state is not faithful with the system because there are about four or five years that are empty including year 2016, this is in the full budget section.
Edo is the only state with a relatively good history of open budget when compared with the above list, You could google the state’s budget and would be sure to get something on it, and there is a section on their website that has the budget.
Kaduna state has an excellent history of open budget; it has an online portal called open Kaduna where you can download full documents of the present year’s budget and even the previous ones.
Kaduna open budget system is the perfect example of the open budget system that YMonitor is advocating. We do not want a partial release or summarized version of the budget, States should release or publish full documents of their proposed spending.