Previous Gombe State Governor Ibrahim Dakwambo was on Thursday blamed by current Governor for running a careless monetarily government.
Governor Inuwa Yahaya made the claim while reporting the disclosure of 2557 bank accounts, connected to the state government.
He talked at the launch of a one-day workshop on Treasury Single Account (TSA) on Cash Management Strategy for Chief Accounting and Paying Officers and Heads of MDAs/Higher organizations in the state.
The Governor said the revelation demonstrated the level of the financial indiscipline and obscurity handed down to his government.
He stated: "The exercise has no doubt recorded tremendous successes. A total of 2,292 accounts linked to the state government were captured by the NIBSS and additional 265 hidden accounts were discovered. The sum of N1.48 billion was discovered from 860 accounts that were hitherto dormant or undisclosed. The 586 dormant accounts were closed after generating their annual account statements for proper reconciliation and documentation. This shows the enormity of the financial indiscipline and opacity inherited by our administration."
As indicated by the Governor, with the current circumstance, the state has no choice except to renovate or drop head down.
"It is either we reform or we perish; Gombe state gets about N3.5 billion as statutory allocation. We are hovering between N200 million and N400 million Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). The water board alone on the average is taking about N400 million monthly. N1.35 billion goes to the civil service, who are only about 67, 000 in the state out of the population of merely 3.5 million people.
He said the workshop is pointed toward preparing the bookkeeping and paying officials and CEOs of tertiary establishments with the significant abilities and procedures to fulfill the needs of the new TSA system adding that the state government TSA strategy is equipped towards the advancement of sound budgetary order and settling in a culture of responsibility and straightforwardness in administration.
Yahaya stated: "It is worthy of note that on our coming to office on May 2019, we met the State finances in a delicate situation, characterized by high debt burden, wastefulness and lack of accountability.
