A Bill for the enactment of the Rivers State Financial Crimes Commission...by Saatah Nubari

A Bill for the enactment of the Rivers State Financial Crimes Commission. Sounds wonderful right? Read a post where the State House of Assembly was said to begging the National Assembly to relinquish more power/responsibility to them. You can read it here. They’ve been a tad busy recently; deliberating and passing the new Neighborhood Safety Bill and amendments for the Anti-Kidnapping and Anti-Cultism Bills respectively. This should be their next focus, creating and enacting a Bill to tackle financial crimes in Rivers, State mostly in public finance where Rivers State is involved, be it directly or indirectly.

We are still yet to get the detailed budget. I don’t mean the usual budget speech with the general figures per ministry. I mean the “The Repainting of Model Girls Secondary School Rumueme = 5,000,000" type of detailing. The absence of that in the public domain, is why you’ll see argument on figures even by persons in government or with “access” to government. So for example today the Neighborhood Safety Bill is 20bn, and ten minutes after the program, someone counters with 22bn on Facebook. That notwithstanding, the State House of Assembly should begin to play its part in ensuring transparency in the public and private sector in the state. And I’m not sure there’s a better way to do that than to pass laws to serve that purpose.

This is necessary because as we move for resource control, and away from the 13% derivation, accountability goes hand in hand with it. Ekiti State government is already thinking along that line. Let’s discourage fraudulent behavior when it comes to our public finance. This is arguably the most important step on a developmental pyramid.