{"id":300562,"date":"2017-03-10T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T06:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=300562"},"modified":"2017-03-10T06:00:46","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T06:00:46","slug":"allocating-ghc-500m-to-presidency-wrong-ablakwa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2017\/03\/allocating-ghc-500m-to-presidency-wrong-ablakwa\/","title":{"rendered":"Allocating GHC 500m to presidency wrong – Ablakwa"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Member of Parliament for North Tongu, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, has said the allocation of some 500 million Ghana cedis to the presidency is too high, and cannot be justified.<\/p>\n
The MP has accused the presidency of defying the country’s austere conditions to allocate a huge amount of 1.5 billion cedis – the highest ever allocation to the presidency in the history of the country.<\/p>\n
This is in spite of the fact that, about one billion of the 1.5 billion is going to be used for several of the government’s special projects announced in the budget statement.<\/p>\n
Speaking to\u00a0Citi News’<\/strong> Duke Mensah Opoku, the former Deputy Education Minister said there is no purpose tied to these funds especially when the governing NPP is claiming that the budget for several sectors has been cut down.<\/p>\n \u201cThe justification which honourable colleague Members of Parliament sought to provide cannot be justified. We are talking about a staggering 1.5 billion, an allocation of 1.5 billion cedis. If you look at the 2016 budget, the allocation to the office of government machinery was in the region of 700 million cedis. Now if you come to even combine 4 year allocations; 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015,if you combine all those allocations to the office of government machinery , you will get 1.3 billion. It is still less than 1.5 billion cedis which has been allocated in just one year to the office of government machinery, and the point I was making is that, this is the year that the President and the Finance Minister are appealing to Ghanaians that there are too many rigidities in the budget.\u201d<\/p>\n