The Kwara State House of Assembly has passed into law the 2024 Appropriation Bill of N292,741,292,132.30 presented to the legislature by Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq.
The governor had, on December 14, 2023, presented a budget of N296,457,875,578, with the House passing it after a downward review of N3,716,583,446 representing a 1.5 per cent decrease in the appropriation.
The Speaker of the House, Yakubu Danladi-Salihu, while presiding over the plenary on Wednesday commended his colleagues, management and staff of the House, especially the Appropriation Committee, under the chairmanship of Fatimoh Arinola Lawal, for the due diligence and success of the exercise.
He called for sustained efforts to ensure that the budget is substantially implemented and that the state gets value for the public funds to be expended.
Danladi-Salihu explained that the budget passed puts capital expenditure at 61 per cent of the total budget size, while recurrent expenditure now takes 39 per cent as presented by the governor.
He noted that Kwara State has adopted the newly introduced budget template of the Nigeria Governors Forum, NGF, which has been designed in line with global best practices in budgeting.
The speaker added that with the latest development, the Kwara State Legislature has again blazed the trail in this direction and has consolidated her age-long frontline position in the community of state legislatures in the federation.
“Recall also that the annual budgets of the state in the recent past conformed with the fiscal reform of the State Fiscal Transparency, Accountability, and Sustainable, SFTAS programme. It is gladdening to note that our dear state reaped the benefits of doing so while the programme lasted up until the end of the 1st quarter of 2023 when it wound down.
“With the full adaptation and domestication of the National Charts of Accounts in the preparation of the 2024 budget, Kwara has again keyed into the newly introduced State Action on Business Enabling Reforms, SABER, that has come to take the place of SFTAS.
“The 2024 budget of the government of Kwara State that has just been passed is therefore in full compliance with the SABER template and this has placed the state in a vantage position of eligibility for intervention funds from the economic reform programme,” the Speaker noted.
Write a Comment