El-Rufai presents 2019 budget — first governor to do so

Nasir el-Rufai, governor of Kaduna state, has presented the proposed 2019 budget to the state house of assembly.

The N155.86 billion budget is broken into N62.3billion recurrent and 93.5billion capital expenditure.

The education and health sectors are the most favoured with 27.5 percent and 15.02 percent respectively.

Though the budget is 28% reduction from N216.65 billion budgeted last year, el-Rufai pledged that his administration would complete all the projects it started and pay up all its contractual obligations before the end of the year.

“The proposed 2019 budget size is N155,865,339,539.77 with recurrent expenditure of N62,339,040,309.19 and capital expenditure of N93,526,299,230.58 representing 40% as recurrent expenditure and 60% as capital expenditure,” he said.

“The 2019 budget keeps faith with our commitment to human capital development through investments in the social sector, which takes 42.8% of the budget. Social sector spending is mainly on education which is allocated 27.15% and health on which we propose to spend 15.02%.”

According to the Governor, the key targets of the budget from fiscal perspective are, “ensuring the actualization of the development priorities of the government as articulated in the state development plan and respective Sector Implementation Plans (SIPs) and maintaining a favourable proportion of capital to recurrent expenditure.”

“Mr. Speaker, we will strive to complete every single project we have started in each of our 23 local government areas, and to pay the contractors we have commissioned to work for us. We will continue to cut the cost of government and ensure that our people are the ultimate beneficiaries of public resources.”

Aminu Shagali, speaker of the assembly, commended the government for its stride over the years.

El-Rufai is the first governor to present next year’s budget to the assembly.