Abiodun  Ladepo Reacts to Makinde’s Reduction of Budget from N285b to N182b

One thing you have to give the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Oyo State, and particularly the Makinde administration, is the savvy use of propaganda – twisting bad news to “good” news while the media outlets eat it all up.

Take for instance the announcement that the Governor Seyi Makinde  has reduced the 2019 budget, prepared by the Abiola Ajimobi administration from N285b to N182b (a shaving off of N103b) simply because the budget was “unrealistic”.

In that same tweet, Governor Makinde  stated that he increased the budget for education “upward” to 10% of the total budget.

Well, the questions I would ask him if I were still a practicing journalist in the state are:

1. Since a budget is a projection of income (revenues) that can be spent, what makes the governor think the state cannot, realistically, earn N285b?

2. Could the downward review be because the governor has offered so many “freebies” that have eaten into its Internally Generated Revenues (IGRs)?

3. By how much have ANY steps taken by his administration increased the state’s IGR?

4. How much loan has he taken so far and how much does he plan to take in the 2019 fiscal year?

5. How much has he paid back out of the debts owed (cumulatively) by multiple past administrations, and how does he plan to pay back the rest and bring the state to a debt-free status by 2023,

6. When he said he increased the education budget to 10%, what was the percentage budgeted by Ajimobi…9%, 8%?

7. And what are the naira amounts of the education budget? I ask this because 9% of Ajimobi’s N285b (assuming it was 9%), is significantly higher than 10% of Makinde’s N182b.

So, e ma p’aja l’obo fun wa mo.

It is not enough to just tell the people that the budget had to be reduced because it was not “realistic”. The media must make him explain why it’s not “realistic”.

Governance is not child’s play o. It is a lot of work.

And it is not charity…lol.

We can’t just depend on federal allocations, World Bank grants and loans for execution of capital and recurrent expenditures. Such laziness led to past financial crises when we couldn’t pay salaries and pensions on time because federal allocations dried up as oil sales plummeted .

We must generate our own funds through various kinds of investments and an expanded but fair taxation base.