Participants at a one-day town hall meeting in Yenagoa agreed that Bayelsa State Government should address the basic necessities of life which include shelter, education, health, agriculture and electricity.

The meeting which was organised by a civil society organisation called Niger Delta Citizens and Budget Platform (NDCBP) was at the instance of reviewing Bayelsa State budget of N161.2billion for 2011 and the need for the state government to implement rights-based budgets with priority on education and health sectors.

The stakeholders, after an analysis of the state budget for the 2011 fiscal year, were unanimous that capital projects allocations of N6.4billion (2.5 percent) and N3.9billion (1.9 percent) to the education and health sectors from the overall budget were too meagre for the realisation of government’s objectives for the sectors.

The participants regretted that agriculture was not allocated any capital funds even when the state government expressed its interest in diversifying its economy.

They equally observed that contrary to frequent denials that Bayelsa did not operate security vote, the 2011 budget, under ‘Overhead Costs’,provided for ‘General Security’ and ‘Security and Government House Operations’totalling N5.7billion without specific details.

The analysis also showed that general overhead costs gulped a whopping N30.3billion with Government House alone getting N10.6billion, being a sharp rise of nearly 100 percent from N5.6billion allocated in 2010.

Among others, that items listed under ‘General Administration received 28 percent of the 2011 recurrent expenditure and 17 percent of the capital expenditures, which the participants pointed out was at the expense of key sectors of education and health.

The participants noted that while the education sector recorded reduced allocation of N5billion between 2009 and 2011 with share of 4 percent in 2011, the health sector recorded geometrical reduction of not less than N600million each year during the period with 2 percent in 2011.

In his presentation titled, “A Human Rights Perspective to the Analyses of the 2011 Budgets of 5 Niger Delta States”, co-ordinator of NDCBP, Ken Henshaw, said government has constitutional obligations to work towards the fundamental rights of citizens “especially under the directive principles of state policy”.

Henshaw, who decried government officials’ interpretation of directive principles of state policy as “prescriptive”, argued that besides the 1999 constitution, Nigeria had ratified other international conventions such as United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights and the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which obligated it to ensure rights of citizens to quality education and health care.

“The budget is a fundamental tool with which a government can realise its rights commitment to citizens. These rights and obligation of governments are sometimes enshrined in the constitution as fundamental human rights, but most times as directive principles of state policy”, Henshaw emphasised.

Henshaw stated that Bayelsa had no reason to remain an educationally less developed state with poor access to health care at all levels.

In his remark, country representative of New York-based Revenue Watch Institute (RWI), sponsors of the budget monitoring and evaluation in the Niger Delta states, Dauda Garuba, called for synergy between civil society groups and citizens to make government accountable.

Garuba expressed the hope that the move by Governor Seriake Dickson’s administration to run a transparent government would be sustained while ensuring proper implementation of yearly budgets.