El-Rufai presents N215.9b 2017 budget to Assembly

Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai has presented a proposed 2017 budget of N215.9 billion before the Kaduna State House of Assembly.

Besides, the budget proposal, according to him, was a three-year multi-year budget estimate, which also includes N218.6 billion for 2018 and N214.6 billion for 2019 fiscal years.

The proposed budget was made up of N85.5 billion (40 per cent) as recurrent expenditure and N130.3 billion (60 per cent) as capital expenditure.

Education gets the largest chunk of the budget with N48.9 billion allocated for the sector followed by works, housing and transport that has N24.5 billion each, while health had N10.3 billion allocated to it. Water resources has N8.1 billion, while rural and community development that has been withdrawn from the office of deputy governor and made a ministry on its own was allocated N7.7 billion.

Agriculture and natural resources both had N4.5 billion allocated to each, while social development and commerce, industry and tourism both gets N2.2 billion and N1.6 billion respectively.

The economic sub-sector was allocated N37.7 billion, social sub-sector N56.6 billion and regional sub-sector N12.6 billion. General administration has N23.2 billion budgeted for it with the Executive arm being allocated N17.8 billion, law and justice N1.2 billion, legislature N458 million and governance N3.7 billion.

Addressing the lawmakers while presenting the budget proposal yesterday at Lord Lugard House, Governor El-Rufai said: “This is a significantly larger budget size than the N189.9 billion we initially considered. We presented the draft estimates for discussion through consultations with the private sector, civil society and, finally to the general public, at a town hall meeting.

“We reinforce our commitment to social justice by retaining high levels of spending on our social programmes. Social justice obliges us to sustain investments in education, health, infrastructure and social development.”

According to him, the budget is opened to monitoring by the legislators and members of the public, while the expected outcome of the budget at the end of 2017 should also be seen as “continuing existing programmes, completion of Zaria water project, unprecedented rebuilding and equipping of schools and massive programme to rehabilitate, maintain or rebuild township roads.”