{"id":75078,"date":"2025-09-07T20:09:47","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T20:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=75078"},"modified":"2025-09-07T20:09:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T20:09:47","slug":"cso-slams-abuja-lawmakers-for-spending-billions-on-streetlights-cars-over-education-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/09\/07\/cso-slams-abuja-lawmakers-for-spending-billions-on-streetlights-cars-over-education-health\/","title":{"rendered":"CSO Slams Abuja Lawmakers for Spending Billions on Streetlights, Cars Over Education, Health"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A civil society organisation, MonITNG, has faulted Abuja lawmakers Senator Ireti Kingibe, Ajiya Abdulrahman, and Joshua Chinedu Obika for prioritising streetlights, vehicles, and patronage-driven projects over education and healthcare in the 2024 federal budget.<\/p>\n<p>In a statement on Monday, MonITNG noted that more than \u20a61.1 billion was allocated to \u201cpolitical patronage\u201d projects, including \u20a6150 million for solar streetlights, \u20a6100 million for lighting the Apo Legislators\u2019 Quarters, \u20a6100 million for vehicles for traditional rulers, and \u20a675 million for household items.<\/p>\n<p>By contrast, the lawmakers earmarked just \u20a625 million for 35 desktop computers at Orozo Secondary School, \u20a650 million for educational grants to indigent students, and \u20a650 million for a one-off medical outreach, which the CSO dismissed as \u201cmere tokens.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The group criticised the neglect of Abuja\u2019s satellite communities, citing dilapidated schools, under-equipped health centres, and unsafe water in Abaji, Kwali, and Gwagwalada.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe state of education, water, and health facilities in Abuja\u2019s satellite communities remains in ruins,\u201d MonITNG said. \u201cThese are the urgent needs that should have guided budget nominations, but they were ignored.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The CSO also flagged questionable implementation arrangements, pointing out that projects were assigned to agencies with no legal mandate in the FCT, including the College of Veterinary and Medical Laboratory Technology (Plateau), the Federal College of Horticulture (Gombe), and the Cooperative College (Oji River).<\/p>\n<p>It added that this practice mirrors long-standing concerns raised by BudgIT over project duplication, misallocation, and poor transparency in Nigeria\u2019s budgeting process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata A civil society organisation, MonITNG, has faulted Abuja lawmakers Senator Ireti Kingibe, Ajiya Abdulrahman, and Joshua Chinedu Obika for prioritising streetlights, vehicles, and patronage-driven projects over education and healthcare in the 2024 federal budget. In a statement on Monday, MonITNG noted that more than \u20a61.1 billion was allocated to \u201cpolitical patronage\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":75079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75080,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75078\/revisions\/75080"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}