Lagos Appropriation Bill signed into law

NEWS 24

Lagos - Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, has signed a re-ordered 2014 Appropriation Bill into law in a move aimed at retaining the flexibility of government to meet the needs of the people.

The re-ordered budget total of N11,66 billion is made up of N7, 2 billion reordered into recurrent expenditure and N4,46 billion into capital expenditure representing a ratio of 51percent for capital to 49 percent to recurrent.

Speaking at the signing ceremony which took place at the Conference Room of the Lagos House, Ikeja, Fashola added that rather than increasing the budget size, the government was reordering its priorities.

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He explained that the reordering has arisen from the increased need to spend a little more than anticipated on the delivery of housing stock as well as developments that have affected projections on incomes that have been made as receivables to the State University (LASU) which has changed somewhat and creating gaps that have to be filled, if LASU must continue to meet many of its obligations.

“It also arises from an opportunity to benefit from Counterpart Funding which we did not anticipate in the beginning of the year from Department for International Development(DFID) and enables us to access N1 billon if we put another N1 billion for this year and we would then budget for the remainder of the second phase of the project next year.”

He added, If do access that as this budget will permit us to, it will help start a project that enables us to fill the failure that we are experiencing in the power gap, supply of regular power to our schools through innovative solar projects which the DFID wants us to undertake, so about 172 schools and 11 Primary Health Care Centres (PHC) will benefit from that.”

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The governor explained that the learning environment, the teaching environment as well as the healthcare environment would ultimately benefit from the reordering, adding that there are also continuing demand for services daily and an increasing population.

According to the Governor, while some of the service requirements could be shelved, some could not and the state wanted to accommodate as much as it could this year.

“The security challenge remains there and we are only able to stay abreast of it if we keep all of the apparatus, men and personnel in tip-top condition. Of course, there is medical development as well because every year, this government sponsors citizens young, old, not so old who have complex ailments that we do not have local, national specialties for to overseas, often for surgical interventions,” he said.