A civil society organisation, Policy Alert has berated the governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodinma for prioritising his office expenditure over the state’s social sector budget implementation in the third quarter of 2023.
The group lamented that it was worrisome that the governor’s office expenditure is given preference over key sectors in the state.
Speaking via a statement by its Programme Officer, Fiscal Reforms and Anti-Corruption, Faith Paulinus, the group observed that while the entire Ministries, Departments, and Agencies in the State had only N7.37 billion capital release, the Office of the governor alone had a total expenditure of N11.84bn which is 60.6 percent above what all other sectors in the state received during the quarter.
Policy Alert warned that the State Government may engage in extra-budgetary expenses for the office of the Governor if the unnecessary spending trend continues. 
The statement read in part, “A trend analysis reveals that the priority given to the Office of the Governor has been unnecessarily high. For instance, for the last three quarters of 2023 (January -September) the office of the Governor has had a release of N31.5bn which is already 95 percent of the N33.1bn budgeted for the office for the entire 2023 fiscal year.
“If the spending trend continues in the last quarter, there is a strong likelihood that the State Government may engage in extra-budgetary expenses for the office of the Governor.”
While noting that there is nothing wrong in making expenditures to the Office of the Governor if there was a budget for the expenses, the organization said what is worrisome is the total neglect of social sectors which had zero capital release during the quarter.
Policy Alert called on the state government to give more attention to the social sector in the last quarter of 2023 stressing that for the entire Social Services Sector to get only a capital release of N4.17bn for the three quarters means that citizens were seriously being starved of social services.
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