El-Rufai presents N233 billion 2022 budget proposal to state assembly

13 Oct El-Rufai presents N233 billion 2022 budget proposal to state assembly

Governor Nasir El-Rufai on Tuesday presented a N233 billion budget proposal for 2022 to the Kaduna State House of Assembly. He was accompanied to the Assembly by his deputy, Hadiza Balarabe, Commissioner for Budget and Planning, Mohammed Abdullahi, and members of his cabinet.

In his over one-hour presentation, Mr El-Rufai said the state expects internally generated revenue of N67.26 billion and N24.9 billion from Value Added Tax (VAT) to partly finance the budget.

The budget has a capital expenditure of N146 billion and recurrent spending of N87.6 billion.

He also said the state expects N54.19 billion from the Federation Account and N500 million for COVID-19 response.

He added that the government would borrow N19.8 billion from local and external sources, raise N34.08 billion from grants and N500 million from the sale of government assets, among others.

Giving a sectoral breakdown of the budget, Mr El-Rufai said: “Agriculture was allocated N1.79 billion; Business, Innovation and Technology, N3.72 billion; Housing and Urban Development, N9.34 billion; Public Works and Infrastructure, N36.97 billion.

“Education was allocated the highest vote of N44.68 billion; Health, N22.76 billion and Social Development, N690.52 million.”

He said the government earmarked N2.98 billion for Environment and Natural Resources; N4.99 billion for Water, and N18.13 billion for general administration.

Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai presenting the state’s 2022 budget

“This government has recorded the highest levels of budget performance in the history of the state, injecting the largest ever capital investment in the history of the state. In 2019, Kaduna State achieved 97.5 per cent budget performance for capital expenditure, spending N148.57 billion of the N152.33 billion budgeted. This is more than twice the erstwhile record of capital spending of over N62 billion in 2016.

“We have paid almost the entire N14 billion arrears of gratuity and death benefit we inherited from 2010. We are faithfully implementing the contributory pension scheme and paying retirees on defined benefits even as we raised the minimum monthly pension to N30,000.

“Our investment in Social Welfare continues with funding of initiatives to support various demographics. We are funding several skills acquisition and entrepreneurship programmes for youths and women, including the Kaduna State Women Economic Empowerment Programme (KADSWEP) with N200 million low-interest microcredits targeting women entrepreneurs and vulnerable groups.

“ 5000 young graduates have been trained in entrepreneurship through the Kaduna Startup and Entrepreneurship Programme, KADSTEP. With our partners in the Bank of Industry and the Kaduna Business School, we have unveiled KADSTEP 2.0 which will focus on training in ICT skills. This reinforces initiatives like Click-On Kaduna which has enabled thousands of young people to learn to code and acquire other digital skills at our Kaduna ICT hub.

“While implementing governance reforms, we have also focused on maintaining our credentials as one of the foremost investment destinations in Nigeria, attracting $2.8bn in investments and pledges. We recently hosted the sixth edition of the Kaduna Economic and Investment Summit, KADInvest. This concluded with the commissioning of the tomato processing plant of Tomato Jos, one of the investors in the agriculture sector in our state.

“We are looking forward to the commissioning early in 2022 of the Gujeni iron and steel plant of the African Natural Resources and Mines in Kagarko LGA. We also expect the Dangote-Peugeot vehicle assembly project and the OCP fertiliser plant located along the Kaduna-Abuja Road to come on stream,” Mr El-Rufai said.