2020 budget: At Q3, capital expenditure performance was 77 percent —Lagos govt

THE Lagos State government has disclosed that the performance on the capital expenditure side of the 2020 budget was 77 per cent as of third quarter of 2020.

This disclosure was made known by the Lagos State Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Mr Samuel Egube during a virtual media roundtable on the state’s 2021 budget that was organised by the Cyno Group consulting recently.

Other participants from the state government included Folashade Adefisayo, Commissioner for Education; Abisola Olusanya, Commissioner for Agriculture; Rabiu Olowo, Commissioner for Finance; Olatunbosun Alake, Special Adviser on Innovation and Technology; Aramide Adeyoye, Special Adviser on Works and Infrastructure and Frederic Oladeinde, the Commissioner for Transport.

He expressed optimism that the performance of the budget would be driven to 90 per cent, stating that the drive is to make Lagos the hub of Africa.

“As of third quarter of 2020, the performance on the capital expenditure side of the 2020 budget was 77 per cent. “It is our expectation that we should be able to drive it to 89 per cent or 90 per cent at the end of the year. So, we are doing well in terms of the performance drive,” he said.

“The drive was for Lagos to be the technology hub of Africa,” Egube said.

Speaking about the THEMES agenda, he said: “We believe that we needed to make Lagos a 21st century megacity and we are going to be focusing on food security, energy and on basically improving the ease of doing business in Lagos. Also, this includes things around security and basically digitalising governance.

“But we knew that the entertainment industry has not received significant amount of help. We believe that they have done so much in employment and contribution to our brand, both locally and internationally and we felt that we needed tourism and entertainment to be one of the pillars. We felt if we supported them more significantly, it would be extremely beneficial to us.”

According to Egube, agriculture became a poster child for the administration with the outbreak of the COVID-19. He said the pandemic taught the state that food security should be a very important part of their strategy going forward.

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