From Ahmed Rufa’i, Dutse
In a bid to ensure citizen participation in the budgeting process, the Exceptional Leadership and Integrity Promotion (ELIP) has collected over 5,000 inputs from citizens across Jigawa State for the 2025 budget.
ELIP’s Executive Director, Comrade Isah Mustapha, disclosed this during a town hall meeting with Civil Society Organizations and stakeholders in Dutse, the state capital.
Mustapha explained that the inputs, gathered from 287 political wards, highlight citizens’ needs and interests to be reflected in the next year’s budget.
He emphasized the importance of community involvement in the budgeting process, stating that it ensures resource prioritization and meaningful development.
ELIP’s target is to submit the compiled inputs to the government for inclusion in the 2025 budget, thereby promoting citizen-centered governance and development in Jigawa State.
The executive director noted that “ELIP has since embarked on massive public mobilization and enlightenment across 287 political wards on citizens right and their inputs in the state’s budget every year.
According to him “The purposes is to ensure community needs priority are reflected in the state annual budget so that it can have meaningful changes in terms of resources prioritization and programming in the state”.
He started further that “Based on our annual appraisal of government policies and programs, we observed that if we continue with the usual budget system we will not achieve any progress
“This year we conducted the town hall meeting at the three senatorial zones selecting one community based organisation from each of the 287 political ward online, where we received over 5,000 input from citizens” he said.
“Because I believe Jigawa state nobody is happy with our indices across capital development and other developmental indices”, ISAH said.
He then called on government to have a realignment for needs and prioritization in the budget to reflect the community needs, yearning and aspiration based on priority that can solve Community’s problems.