•Says it’s biggest source of waste

Former governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, has described security votes as unconstitutional and the “biggest source of waste” in Nigeria.

Speaking at The Platform, a programme organised by Covenant Christian Centre in Lagos, yesterday, Obi said ex-governors should be made to account for security votes.

“Let me tell Nigerians; there is nothing in our Constitution called security votes. Anybody who tell you that is lying. It is a terminology that was formulated over the years, from one thing or the other. What we have is Contingency Fund.

“I can say today that it is being abused, it has become our biggest source of waste. Security vote is not supposed to be more than two, three, maximum four percent of security votes. Today, it is 20, 30 percent of expenditure.

“Just to show you how bad it is, somebody told me that my security votes can be as much as N12 billion, so, N1 billion per month? So, I said ‘fine, how much have we given to primary schools per year?’

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“They said we have 1,040 primary schools, I said, ‘fine, if we give the primary schools five, five million naira, it will amount to N5 billion per year.’ We have 257 secondary schools and I said we would give each N10 million per year and these are things you can check.

“So, they removed it from the remaining seven and I said we have four critical hospitals built by the churches. We didn’t have any School of Nursing, School of Midwifery when I started, and these hospitals were functional.

“Though they were not owned by government, I included one built by a Bishop and said we will share N1 billion with these five hospitals. By the time I finished, everything was reduced to about N2.5 billion. I said ‘this is the maximum that we would allocate to security votes.

“Apart from Lagos, I provided the highest number of vehicles to the Police, bought vehicles from every community in Anambra. I had excess.

“From the excess, I gave N1 million to every Anambrarian (indigene of Anambra) who had a First Class degree, which I did for about 500 of them. They are all over the place now.

“For me, there is need to review it.  In fact, what I say to people is that when you finish being a governor, in Anambra state, for example, where I finished, I should be invited to account for security votes so that people will know that when you finish, you account for it.”