General News
Bagudu Tasks Journalists on Deeper Budget Scrutiny, Accountability
The Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Senator Abubakar Bagudu, has urged media professionals to promote informed public discourse and strengthen accountability in budget processes to help citizens understand the choices underpinning the Federal Government’s development agenda.
Senator Bagudu made the call in Abuja during a one-day Capacity-Building Workshop organised by the Senate Press Corps on the theme, “Leveraging Legislative Oversight and Media Collaboration to Safeguard the National Budget from Unlawful Insertion.”
The Minister said effective scrutiny of the national budget must go beyond identifying controversial provisions to understanding the constitutional process, the rationale behind budgetary choices and the development needs those provisions are intended to address.
He urged journalists to ask the right questions and thoroughly investigate budget provisions rather than draw conclusions without sufficient context.
The President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, who was represented by the Chairman, Senate Committee on Media and Public Affairs, Senator Yemi Adaramodu, charged journalists to pay close attention to Senate business rules as a guide, ensure balanced reportage and set the highest standards in parliamentary reporting.
While commending the media and civil society for their scrutiny and monitoring roles in ensuring that the legislature discharges its functions in the nation’s democratic governance, Senator Akpabio appealed for sustained collaboration between the media and civil society organisations.
He pointed out that lawmakers, the media and civil society should be partners in advancing the nation’s democracy.
The Chairman, Senate Press Corps, Mr Taiye Odewale, explained that the choice of the theme for the capacity-building workshop was to enable journalists to engage the budgeting processes thoroughly by leveraging the power of legislative oversight by lawmakers to detect unlawful insertions of the budget as a recurring decimal in the national budget.
The workshop featured various papers on adopting Artificial Intelligence for parliamentary media and public accountability, following the budget and following the money, citizens’ budget needs assessment, tracking the appropriation bill estimates with the national Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, as well as engagement of lawmakers with the implementing agencies of government.
