Lagos State governor, Babatunde Fashola has sued for the adjustment of the state budget to meet the provision of services to citizens, which are “sufficiently compelling and cannot wait until 2015”.
A letter from the governor demanding the adjustment which was titled; ‘Year 2014 Budget Re-ordering of priorities’ was read at plenary of the Lagos State House of Assembly, yesterday, by Clerk of the House, Mr. Ganiyu Abiru.
The governor noted that the re-ordering, “is to take care of emerging issues like the reversal of Lagos State University, LASU, school fees policy which requires us to make provisions to cover LASU shortfall in projected revenues in order to service the school; the unanticipated but very urgent need to address the threat of the Ebola Virus Epidemic, EVD, and also a need for counterpart funding request that enables us to access developmental funds to install solar power panels in 172 public schools and 11 primary health centres in the first phase”.
He stressed that the adjustment would not affect the original 2014 budget size of N489.69 billion as, “we have discovered that there are still unutilized provisions by some Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, which may remain so till year end. Hence we are proposing to move such provisions to where they are more urgently needed to enable the state government address pressing needs in the areas identified above and other areas like security, housing among others.”
Fashola pointed out that the re-ordering was proposed from Capital Expenditure Provisions of 10 agencies with a total value of N9.960 billion.
He informed that the re-ordering was also to urgently address some of the critical unbudgeted expenditure requests by various MDAs. “We have received request aggregating to the sum of N79.302billion but will clearly be unable to accommodate most of these requests this year.” The letter said.
At the end of the debate over the governor’s request, the lawmakers committed it to the House Committee on Economic Planning and Budget and expect it to report back to the House today, because of the urgency of the issues involved.
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