A major concern for most Nigerian states regarding fiscal appropriation has been how revenue would be generated or improved upon. Most of these states’ expenditures are largely dependent on external and domestic borrowing, federal government allocation and loans or grants from multilateral institutions and banks.
Ripples Metrics has reported the share of debt figures in all states. Most of the states have the lowest debt profile but also do not generate sufficient revenue to run the fiscal appropriation of their states.
For instance, the total 2024 budget for all northern states is N6.12 trillion while only Lagos State, located in Southern Nigeria, has a budget of N2.27 trillion. By this, Lagos’s budget can take care of 37 per cent of the total northern state budget or almost half of the northern states, when arranged from the least.
However, in this second part of the report RipplesMetric looks into the budget for states in the northern region, juxtaposing the figures to identify what arm of the government gets the highest expenditure.
In the northern region, the total budget for the 16 states’ assemblies is N153.17 billion. However, the governor’s offices for these states are expected to spend N301.3 billion for 2024.
A look at the assembly budget shows that states like Adamawa, Kaduna Sokoto, Plateau and Kano had the highest allocation with N18.57 billion, N17.11 billion, N10.16 billion, N10.15 billion and N10.08 billion.
Others include Bauchi assembly with an allocation of N5.45 billion, Benue with N6.18 billion, Borno with N8.1 billion, Gombe with N5.61 billion, Jigawa with N7.17 billion, Katsina with N4.83 billion, Kebbi with N6.72 billion and Kogi with N7.77 billion
READ ALSO:RipplesMetric: In 2024, state govts, assemblies will spend N1.214 trillion on themselves (Part I)
Also, Kwara assembly has N7.77 billion, Nasarawa with N6.03 billion, Niger with N4.15 billion, Taraba with N9.5 billion, Yobe with N3.99 billion and Zamfara assembly with N3.83 billion.
On the other hand, a cursory look showed that the expenditure for government houses in the northern region gulp more allocation.
The states with the highest allocation to the governors’ office are Kogi with N39.2 billion, Taraba with N37.3 billion, Benue with N29.6 billion, Borno with N23.4 billion, Zamfara with N21.9 billion and Adamawa with N20.2 billion.
Others next to these are Katsina, Kano, Gombe, Kwara, Niger and Jigawa with N19.4 billion, N19 billion, N16.4 billion, N14.9 billion, N14.4 billion and N10.6 billion respectively.
The states with the lowest allocation to the governor’s office are Bauchi with N3.1 billion, Kaduna with N3.8 billion, Kebbi with N9.4 billion, Kwara with N5.6 billion, Niger with N6.1 billion, Sokoto with N2.7 billion and Yobe state with N4.5 billion.
Our findings showed that most northern states, about 11 states, had more allocations to the government house than state assemblies.
Also, only state assemblies in Bauchi, Kaduna, Kwara, Plateau and Sokoto had more allocation than the governor’s offices.
By: James Odunayo
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