Awara Biokpomabo, the gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the 2019 election in Rivers State says Governor Nyesom Wike is running the affairs of the state without a budget.
Awara told journalists in Port Harcourt that the frequency with which the governor requests for loans indicates that most of the projects were not captured in the budget.
He added that the governor lacks coordination and blueprint but operates on impulse.
He also accused Wike of leaving the people in the dark about the happenings in his government and denied them access to the budget.
This comes as the state assembly on Wednesday approved another 6 billion naira loan requested by Wike barely a month after 18 billion naira was approved for the construction of a fourth flyover bridge.
He also condemned the concentration of projects in Port Harcourt and Obio-Akpor by the Wike’s administration and admonished the governor to invest in human capital development.
According to him: “The frequent requests to the assembly implies that these projects are not captured in the budget. My concern is the disorganized way things are been done. Every project ought to be captured in the budget. If they were captured in the budget, it would be easy to make a request for loans once and for all for projects that are in the budget.
“For coordinated governance, the governor ought to have a budget properly articulated and makes a projection on how to source for funds ahead of time. And perhaps approaches the assembly once to take a loan if the IGR and Federal Allocation will not be enough to implement it.
“This is why we need the budget in the public space so the public can see if these projects are even in the budget. So we know if we have a government where someone just wakes up and says we need to do this and the next morning he is on his way to ask for loan. This is happening because we do not have access to the budget in the public domain. It does not show coordinated governance.
He said: “The disorderliness is showing even in the spread of projects across the state. The government must be able to devise a coordinated way of governing every part of the state. A government should be able to spread it’s projected to the different local governments so it impacts is felt across the board. It ought not to be one city affair.”
