2024 Budget: Crisis Looms Over Appropriation To Edo Deputy Governor’s Office

The lingering political crisis between the deputy governor, Philip Shaibu and his principal, Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State played out last Friday at the Edo State House of Assembly over what some loyal lawmakers to Shaibu considered as “unfair appropriation” in the 2024 budget.

In the budget sighted, Obaseki appropriated N300 million to the deputy governor’s office, governor’s office N19 billion, speaker, N13 billion , secretary to the state government office, SSG gets N18 billion while Head of Service gets N969 million.

It was gathered that the 2024 Appropriation Bill was hurriedly signed into law and is perceived as another attempt to whittle down the deputy governor’s influence ahead of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) primaries in February.

It was learnt that before the controversial budget was passed by the House, there was serious disagreement among the lawmakers over what they described as ” embarrassing allocation” to the office of the deputy governor.

Sources say there were shouting matches, something close to fisticuff amongst the lawmakers at the executive session in a bid to settle the rift arising from the “unfair appropriation.”

At the plenary, the speaker, Hon Blessing Agbebaku was said to have thrown parliamentary decency into the wind, disregarded all efforts made by his fair minded colleagues to ensure that the right thing was done as an unbiased parliament.

The budget the governor presented to the State House of Assembly showed a meager sum of N300 million allocated to the office of the deputy governor as against N18 billion naira allocated to the office of the secretary to the state government and 19 billion naira to the office of the governor.

The breakdown also revealed that the Speaker was a major beneficiary of the controversial budget with an allocation of the sum of N13 billion.

Before the budget was hurriedly passed into law by the speaker at the executive session, there was a serious disagreement among the lawmakers who raised objections to the money that was allocated to the office of the deputy governor.