By Maureen Agbala :
Anambra State Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo has demonstrated his commitment to Ndi Anambra by making sure that 2023 budget is feasible and transparent.
This was said by the Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning, Mrs. Chiamaka Nnake during the inauguration of the 2023 Budget Bilateral Discussion Committee.
The Commissioner in her remarks said that the 2023 Budget is the first one the new administration is doing from the scratch up to completion.
“The one the administration prepared when it took over mantle of leadership on the 17th March, 2022 was a revision of the budget inherited from the former government of Dr Willie Obiano.
“The new budget will be different from the former ones in three ways; the era of allocating pre-budget envelopes for ministries is over.
“The various envelopes of the ministries will be determined by the needs assessment of the people.
“The budget will include three priority projects from the communities and the ministries; it will be a budget of data collected from bottom to top.
“The projects and activities of the ministries in the budget will be aggregated and domiciled in their various professional ministries to ensure that ndi Anambra get the benefit of best technical expertise of the ministries.
“This is to say that the offices or housing needs of all the ministries will be handled by the Ministry of Housing while the Secretary to the State Government’s office will procure and distribute all the motor vehicular needs of all the ministries.’’
Mrs Nnake said that by the new changes, the budget would ensure transparency, accountability and easy for monitoring purposes.
She told the members that the above budget would require primary data collection and urged them to ensure that the integrity of all the data collected and used in the budget are intact.
“The statisticians will ensure that they provide a framework of the data to be collected and ensure that the data are verified and approved by the appropriate authority,’’ she added.
Mr Okey Onyeka of the Civil Right Commission said that they were happy with the changes being introduced by the commissioner into the new budget as they would make the budget realistic, easy to monitor and also have a high performance index.
He further said that in the past, unlike in this budget, budget envelopes were arbitrarily allocated to the ministries without reference to the actual needs.
“These had made the performance index of the budgets to be as low as 40 percent.
“I promise that the team will work hard in line with the commissioner’s directives to ensure that the state government’s objective is realized.’’
The Acting Director, Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Mr Arthur Iweanya said that the bilateral discussion on the budget between the Ministry and other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) is very important for them to confirm and defend their budget-data submissions so as to ensure that a creditable and realistic budget is produced.
He thanked the governor and the commissioner for inaugurating the Bilateral Discussion Committee and the new innovations they brought in to ensure a better and high performance budget for Ndi Anambra.
