Advocacy group, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project has called on the Federal Government to drop the proposed cut in the budgetary allocations to health and basic education or be ready to face litigation.
The group described as illegal the proposal by the Federal Government to cut N26.51bn from basic health care budget and N50.76bn from budgetary allocation to basic education.
It demanded a reversal of the planned budgetary cut within 14 days, threatening to sue the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), and the National Assembly should its demand be ignored.
In an April 18 letter by its Deputy Director, Kolawole Oludare, SERAP argued that there were a lot of other items in the budget, whose allocations the government could slash, instead of cutting budgetary allocations to education and health, with a direct negative impact on the poor masses.
SERAP said, “The cuts would leave the poorest and most vulnerable people without access to these essential public goods and services, and without anywhere to turn, and despite the COVID-19 crisis.
“This would put both the government and the National Assembly in breach of their constitutional and international human rights and anti-corruption obligations.
“Continuing to neglect these basic public goods and services to sustain the apparently lavish lifestyles of members of the National Assembly and other powerful politicians wound exacerbate poverty, inequality, marginalisation and impunity in the country.
“The COVID-19 crisis is a good opportunity to cut the costs of governance, particularly the unsustainable spending on the National Assembly expenses, and the Presidency budget, and to focus on increasing budget allocations to health care and education.
“The authorities’ approach to the National Assembly and Presidency budgets ought to be ‘do more with less.’ While we understand that the country is facing difficult choices in budget allocations, the authorities should have prioritised cuts in the National Assembly and Presidency budgets to increase the allocations to health care and education.”
THE PUNCH
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