The Chairman of Rivers State House of Assembly Committee on Information, Dr Enemi Alagbo George, has described Governor Similayi Fubara’s claim that he was blocked from re-presenting 2025 Appropriation Bill as “the height of insincerity.”

Governor Fubara had said on Wednesday that he was denied access to the Assembly complex to present the budget.

But Dr George in a statement on Thursday in Port Harcourt, said the governor lied when he said he wrote the Assembly concerning the presentation of the budget, noting that there was no official communication between the governor and the House on the issue of presentation of budget.

He said that the Assembly needed the budget to be passed because the governor “has been owing us our entitlements for more than a year and without the budget we can’t get our entitlements.”

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George recalled that on March 3, the House of Assembly wrote to Fubara, requesting him to bring the 2025 budget to the lawmakers following the judgement of the Supreme Court.

The statement read: “We were the ones, who immediately after that judgement appealed to the governor to bring his appropriation bill. We acted immediately because we have the interest of the state at heart and didn’t want Rivers people to suffer any harm.

“Despite withholding our entitlements for over a year and demolishing our chambers, we still wanted him to hasten up the presentation in the interest of the progress of Rivers.

“We indicated our intentions in that letter and even gave him a timeframe because of the urgency of the matter. To regularise his appointments, we also urged him during our subsequent sitting to submit the names of his nominees for the positions of commissioners and some boards’ membership for screening and confirmation.

“But the governor rebuffed our pleas. We sent employees of the Assembly to deliver these resolutions to him but as usual they turned them down at the gate and even brutalized them. We resorted to engaging the services of a courier company.

“How can he turn around to claim that we blocked him from re-presenting his budget? This is the height of sincerity. We even need the budget to be passed because the governor has been owing us our entitlements for more than a year and without the budget we can’t get our entitlements.

“But he still did not heed our call forgetting that there are essential services like hospitals, schools and others to be funded. Our intention was to finish everything about the budget on March 15th so that we could send necessary information and documents to relevant agencies of the government to allow the release of Rivers allocations at the end of March. But with what he is doing, we dont know what he wants to achieve.”