The Head Tracker, BudgIT Foundation, Mr. Uadamen Ilevbaoje, has advocated the need for the stoppage of empowerment programmes being carried out by lawmakers which have been turned to a conduit to siphon public funds.
Ilevbaoje, who disclosed this at a two-day capacity-building workshop on Budget Analysis, Visualisation and Monitoring for Open Alliance Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in Ekiti State, also said the organisation is tracking projects in 32 states of the country.
According to him,the the discovery of non-execution and partial execution of some projects in some locations and sharing of the information in both conventional and social media forced some lawmakers and their contractors back to site to ensure their completion.
He said: “The goal of TRACKA is for citizens to take ownership of the projects in areas because the lawmakers and politicians executing them are not spending their personal money, it’s public money. Your ability to ask questions is part of your civic responsibility to ensure accountability and transparency in the system.
“Abandoning projects has become of the problems we have in Nigeria because there is lack of continuity in governance and succeeding political leaders abandon the projects inherited from their predecessors.
“We are also advocating that political office holders should stop their empowerments because they have been turned into money guzzling scams. Empowerments have become conduit pipes for corruption and a means of siphoning funds.
“It is an anomaly for elected officials to be directly distributing empowerment grants to people in their constituencies instead of bank transfer and this violates probity, transparency and accountability.
Ilevbaoje,who said that many constituency projects facilitated by National Assembly members are under the investigation of anti-graft operatives, lamented poor execution of the few implementable projects from available evidences on the field.
He said investigations revealed that the National Assembly members collected N63 billion in full for empowerments in their various constituencies in 2020 despite the COVID-19 lockdown for greater part of that year
He disclosed that while N59.6 billion was budgeted for provision of empowerments for constituents in the 2021 Budget, N63 billion was budgeted for the same purpose in the 2020 Budget, adding that while federal lawmakers accessed 100 per cent of the cash in 2020 despite the outbreak of COVID-19, 75 per cent of the cash for 2021 has so far been accessed.
He spoke on his experience while on inspection visits to various constituency projects sites under the the instrumentality of TRACKA, saying work on ground did not justify the huge sums of money allocated to federal lawmakers and some state legislators to execute projects for their constituents.
He emphasized the need for citizens to ask questions from their lawmakers on empowerment schemes and constituency projects implemented noting that funds used to carry them out are drawn from the nation’s treasury.
