Nigeria Content Online

The Anambra State government aims to achieve over
70 percent implementation of the 2010 budget by the end of the fiscal
year, the commissioner for budget and economic planning, Chinyere
Okunna, has said.

Ms. Okunna, who addressed the media yesterday in
Awka at a town hall meeting, said only about 40 percent had been
achieved, owing to the rains, which she said had stalled road projects.

She said the purpose of the town hall budget
meeting was to ensure that the various communities made their inputs
into next year’s budget by specifying their areas of need, so that
money would be allocated to them.

“The town hall meetings are part of government’s
participatory budget preparation, which we have been pioneering. It
allows people to make their input into budgeting, unlike the situation
in the past when government imposed budget on the people,” Ms. Okunna
said.

She also noted that the state appreciated its poor
resource base and thus needed to budget meticulously and precisely by
involving the people in the planning.

The officials also said most of those involved in
the budget preparation were also part of the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) programme, where she said the state had equally been doing
well.

Providing water

She said the state had scaled up the provision of
boreholes to communities to enhance availability of water. This, she
said, is a back-up to bigger water projects such as five water schemes
going on in parts of the state.

Assuring them that massive road construction would
recommence after the rains, Ms. Okunna scored the state government high
in such areas as health, education, agriculture, among others.

According to her, the recent provision by the
state government of 100 buses to secondary schools, as well as the
earlier provision of computers, boreholes, generating sets, and
construction of classroom blocks in each of the 177 communities in the
state, had marked the state out as an education-friendly state.