Ebun Francis || Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, the incumbent Governor of Kaduna State took the face off between him and members of the National Assembly a notch higher on Thursday while reacting to the allegation by Mr Yakubu Dogara, the Speaker, House of Representatives, that he only disclosed the security allocation in the budget and not his personal “security votes”.
In a statement by his Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Samuel Aruwan, El Rufai disclosed that he does not receive security votes.
According to the statement, “The Kaduna State Government has presented details of its security budget.
“What was presented represents the only security vote for the entire government. As the figures show, there is no security vote for the Governor of Kaduna State.
“This may be a shock to those used to the notion of security votes as barely disguised slush funds, but we do not operate such a system in Kaduna.
“Our budgets specify what is voted as assistance to security agencies, and its expenditure is properly recorded and accounted for. These are not monies given to or spent by the governor.”
The Governor, therefore, advised leaders of the NASS had security votes allocated to or personally collected by them, to disclose such to the public.
“Our security spending does not operate like the NASS system of sharing public funds in such an opaque fashion that even NASS members do not know how their entire budget is broken down or what the leadership gets as its ‘running costs.”
