Lagos To Run Deficit Budget Till 2013

M r. Ben Akabueze, Lagos State Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, on Wednesday said that the state would continue to run deficit budgets till 2013.

Akabueze, who disclosed this while presenting his ministry’s annual stewardship for 2010 to journalists in Lagos, said there might be improvement in the annual budgets after then.

The commissioner admitted that the state had borrowed, but said the loan was being used to finance capital projects and not for recurrent purposes.

He said that the state had the capacity to service the loans through budgetary provisions.

“Lagos state is the only state in Nigeria that the World Bank granted budget support facility to in Nigeria because of its transparency in its public finance,’ he said.

He said that the contract sum for the 1,455 projects submitted by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in 2010 was scaled down to N286.5 billion from N343 billion.

Akabueze said that this was an improvement over 2009 proposals when the MDAs submitted 990 projects valued at N238.6 billion while the state released N207 billion.

He said that the 2008 and 2010 Ehingbeti Economic Summits organised under his leadership had brought significant dividends from investors to the state.

The commissioner listed some of these dividends as the signing of the contract for the production of transformers in Badagry between the state government and El-Swedy of Egypt and the establishment of Master Card regional office in Lagos.

“Master Card chose Lagos because of its remarkable progress in the last six years in provision of security, good road network and other infrastructure as part of the outfit’s criteria.

“Also 64 companies signed on to operate at the Lagos Free Trade Zone with a turnover investments aggregating to 25 billion dollars injected into the country’s economy,” he said.

Akabueze said that the state had injected about three billion naira as counterpart funds to the Federal Government’s conditional grant scheme.