 As part of efforts to ensure open governance, inclusion of all sectors and residents in budget planning process, Cardinal State Government, with support of other stakeholders, has organised a one-day town hall meeting on the draft 2023 budget of 291.9 billionare. The aim of the meeting is for the Government to interface with stakeholders to get their inputs for eco-representation and inclusion of all sectors in the state. Plus, TV News correspondent Habila Dorafai's report is presented from our students. For democracy of any nation to thrive, they reached the need for government to engage citizens in open governance, policies and programme formulation. The Cardinal State Government, as so-ever-fied, says a responsive government recognises the need to engage its citizens. We recognise early, we need to engage citizens in every step of the government's process. It is my firm belief and hope that this and other reforms that we have, these issues and lives, will continue to guide the deliverability of less sizes to the good people of Cardinal State. While the Commissioner for Budget and Planning, Umar Yusuf Abouke, says the 2023 draft budget was prepared on the expectation that the base effect would decline as economic activities normalised in the non- oil sector. He says government gave more priority to education and health sectors with 40 per cent of the total sum of 65.7 billionare. The town hall meeting is an activity that we have internalised in our budgeting process. It really gives us an avenue to sit down and discuss with citizens and get citizens input into a draft budget every year, the appropriations that we are going to do. And that's really, it is very important to us. The budget size is 291 billion, by the time we clean up, taking the comments of the citizens, taking the comments also of Executive Council members, because we, over the last two days, we sat at the Executive Council and presented the budget. So there are also some inputs from Council members, we will input all of that and then have a final figure that will go to the House of Assembly. So the Cold Chair of Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health, Mustafa Jamarra, calls on government to always cash back the approved budget, seeing that the submission is in areas that need to be looked into. For 2022, we had funds allocated in the budget but it's not being cash backed up to the third quarter and indicating that we are not performing very well in that area. So that was why I started by making a request that, you know, we need to be cash backing some of the allocations in the state budget. Vice-Chairman and Joint Association of People with Disabilities, Keduna State Chapter, Abubakar Suleiman, commended the state government for signing the act of the PWDs. This has been transformed. We hope it has approved 90 million error for the state government that's transformed. But our problem now lies and the issue of a budget applying has simply given us the release but we are still looking at the issue of the cash backing. The cash backing is what is hitting us people now. Like in the first quarter of this year, we were giving the release of 18 billion and the cash backing was given. But for the second and the third quarter, we have the releases but up to now, there are no cash backing and this is affecting our two major centres, that one of Kapachan and Karnatid here. So it's affecting the operation of businesses. The citizens appeal to the government for the full inclusion of youth and women in their programs. Since 2015, the Keduna State government had deployed mechanism to allow citizens participation to discuss and get their input on the draft budget before the final approval to the House. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.