People & Money

BudgIT Apologises to Lagos Govt

Nigeria’s civic advocacy group, BudgIT, has apologized to the Lagos State Government.

The apology came just few days after BudgIT released the 2020 edition of its annual state of states report titled, “Fiscal Sustainability and Epidemic Preparedness Financing at the State Level”, noting that Rivers State ranked first on the 2020 States’ Fiscal Sustainability Index, followed by Anambra and Ogun states.

It stated: “From our 2020 State of States analysis, 13 states were unable to fund their recurrent expenditure obligations together with their loan repayment schedules due in 2019 with their respective total revenues.

“The worst hit of these 13 states are – Lagos, Oyo, Kogi, Osun and Ekiti states while the other states on this pendulum are Plateau, Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Cross River, Benue, Taraba and Abia.

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The public sector-focused civic group on Sunday apologized to the Lagos State Government on its Twitter page about a previous graphic on the ability of states to meet their recurrent expenditure, saying it is retracting such report.

“We are compelled to also use this medium to tender our unreserved apologies to
@followlasgfor the misrepresentation that has trailed Lagos State in the report.”

“Indeed, @followlasgcannot be included in the category of States with a recurrent deficit; thus, not borrowing to pay salaries.”

BudgIT said its metrics focused on NET FAAC and IGR as published by the National Bureau of Statistics due to the disparate nature of revenue framework among Nigerian states.

“We affirm that Lagos State remains way ahead of many of its peers in terms of fiscal health and the capacity to generate revenue internally; and it also has the least dependency on federally collected revenue distributed through FAAC allocations.”

They concluded by saying, “We regret this inconvenience; hence, the previous design is hereby retracted and a review has been commissioned by our research team.”

BudgIT’s State of States report is a snapshot of the fiscal health of all 36 States in the country and it uses four metrics or stress tests to provide a fair overall Fiscal Sustainability Ranking of all the states.

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