Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has said no security vote is appropriated to him by his government.
El-Rufai made the disclosure while reacting to a statement by spokesperson of the House of Representatives, Abdulrazak Namadas, that what
El-Rufai published was the security budget of Kaduna and not his security votes.
El-Rufai’s spokesperson, Samuel Aruwan, on Thursday said the state’s budget specified what was voted to security agencies and nothing was given to the governor.
Aruwan noted that the Kaduna’s security funding is not operated like the national assembly where everything is “opaque”.
He said, “The Kaduna state government has presented details of its security budget. What was presented represents the only security vote for the entire government.
“As the figures show, there is no security vote for the governor of Kaduna state. This may be a shock to those used to the notion of security votes as barely disguised slush funds, but we do not operate such a system in Kaduna.
“Our budgets specify what is voted as assistance to security agencies, and its expenditure is properly recorded and accounted for. These are not monies given to or spent by the governor.
“If the leaders of the NASS have security votes allocated to or personally collected by them, they might wish to disclose such.
“Our security spending does not operate like the NASS system of sharing public funds in such an opaque fashion that even NASS members do not know how their entire budget is broken down or what the leadership gets as its ‘running costs’.
“The figures in the pay slips presented for the Honourable Speaker are in stark contrast to the declaration by The Economist regarding the earnings of NASS members. One of the claims cannot be right.
“However, notwithstanding the intemperate response of the spokesman of the house of representatives, the demand that the NASS budget be made public will not go away.
“It is not personal, and there is a strong civic constituency that is demanding it.
The sooner all of us in public life recognised that the game has changed, and that segments of civil society and indeed everyday citizens of Nigeria, are much more aware, astute and advanced than the state of our politics, the better for our democratic health.”
