Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola
The Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, on Monday presented a budget proposal of N489.69bn to the Lagos State House of Assembly for approval for 2015.
The budget is the same as that of 2014, which stood at N489.69bn.
The budget is made up of capital expenditure of N249.232bn and a recurrent expenditure of N239.948bn in the ratio of 51.49 respectively.
A breakdown of the budget shows that Economic Affairs has the highest allocation of N146.305bn, followed by General Service, which has N107.69bn.
Housing and Community Amenities has N82.14bn; Education, N49.033bn; Health, N44.619bn, and Environmental Protection, N34.953bn.
The governor said, “As you will observe, we have retained essentially the same budget size as 2014. This is for many reasons. One reason is that we have kept a zero deficit to ensure that the next government does not inherit a deficit. This will give them room to start off very quickly when their programmes begin to crystallise and they may need to raise funds.
“Another reason is that our budgets, like all good budgets, are not only defined by plans and expectations, they make more sense if they are defined by resources. Our resources have been severely and adversely affected by the management and lack of transparency of the Federal Government and its agencies of the nation’s oil proceeds.”
The governor said the Federal Government was still owing the state N51bn certified and unpaid out of the N59bn expended on federal roads in Lagos.
“They also owe pension obligations of N673.67bn which they have not paid. And as all of us are aware, oil prices have dropped from $100 per barrel to just around $80 per barrel at the time we finalised the budget.
“Our monthly receipts from FAAC have fallen below our usually conservative expectations for the first time in seven years. And lately, we noticed that reduced patronage of the tourism and entertainment facilities has occurred in the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak. This has translated to reduced consumption and consequently reduced incomes in the consumption tax sub-head of our Internally Generated Revenue,” he said.
Fashola said in spite of the challenges, the 2015 budget would focus on payment of contractors’ liabilities to enable government complete as many projects as possible before handing over.
He added that one of the highlights of the 2015 budget would be the settlement of outstanding pension liabilities that were imposed by the Federal Government which later became contentious.
He explained that without consultation with the state, the Federal Government had reviewed pensioners’ entitlements upwards by 142 per cent without a corresponding upward review of the state’s revenue.
No comments:
Post a Comment