Bello presents N174.85bn 2017 budget

THE Kogi State governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, on Thursday presented the 2017 budget estimate of N174.851 billion to the state House of Assembly for consideration and approval.

The budget is over N73 billion higher than that of 2016, which was N99.998 billion.

Presenting the appropriation bill, the governor explained that N58. 531billion representing 33. 47 per cent would be spent on recurrent items, while N116. 32billion also representing 66. 53billion would be expended on capital items.

According to him, the budget, which was christened “budget of new direction”, was prepared with great premium in the need for prudent management of available resources, in consideration of the present economic realities in the state and the country at large.

Bello said, “On a more technical level, we made sure to prepare this budget in conformity with the terms of Multi-Year Budgeting Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper. We made a realistic and reasonable projection of our revenue and expenditure to avoid bogus and unattainable budgetary figures.”

Giving a sectoral breakdown of the allocation of the funds, the governor said N43.442billion was allocated to administration, N80.424billion to economic, N6. 886 billion to law and justice, while N44.098 billion was set aside for social.

The governor added that the budget consists of a recurrent estimate of N81.666billion with N32.181billion from internal sources, N35.309 from the federation account, N8.085 billion as Value Added Tax.

Other sources of revenue, according to Bello, are N2.209billion from exchange differentials and N3.88billion from budget augmentation.

He noted that the objective of the state was effective allocation of scarce resources to identified critical programmes and projects with the target of completing ongoing projects and incrementally added new projects in the critical areas of need.