AS the Governor of Enugu State, Peter Mbah signed the 2024 budget into law, the immediate focus was how the state will generate N300 billion of the N521.5 budget through internally generated revenue (IGR).
On Wednesday, Mbah addressed the funding of the budget thus: “We are talking about less than 12 percent of our revenue size that we are going to borrow to execute this budget. That is enormous, as we are expecting to mobilize over N300bn from our domestic sources, and that has not happened before.”
Admitting to the enormity of the task of funding the budget, he stated, “what this means is that we are all going to work tirelessly to ensure that these revenues are realised. It also means that for us at the Executive Council, our meetings would largely be on our revenue performance.”
In a statement on the official X handle of the Senior Special Adviser on Media, Dan Nwomeh, the Governor explained that his administration would take critical steps on sectors like e-governance and automation of government services to ensure efficient service delivery.
Mbah, in the statement also promised that the budget would “engender disruptive economic growth, radical infrastructural development.”
In an unprecedented approach, the governor allocated N414.3 billion or 79 per cent of the budget to capital projects. That allocation “is 20 times more than what has been typically spent on capital expenditure in the state since inception,” according to the statement.
To drive home the import of deviation, he stated: “We called this the ‘Budget of Disruptive Economic Growth’ based on the size of our Capital Expenditure.
“You can imagine an economy that is typically used to doing N20bn capital expenditure now going to witness over N400bn Capital Expenditure. It is going to be monumental in the ways our people are lifted out of poverty and in the ways economic activities will blossom.”
The capital expenditure will be sunk into building New Enugu City and “we are going to have our roads paved. We are going to have feeder roads paved as well as the access roads to our farmlands.
“We talk about scaling up our production in the agriculture sector. Our Special Agro Processing Zones will come to life.”
The budget “will ensure that we grow our agriculture so that it is not going to be just for food, it is also going to be for export. It also means that a new sector will be introduced, the energy and minerals sector, which we hope to use to drive our revenue. It means that our resources in that sector will be harnessed.”
The budget will “address most of the gaps we have in our social services. In the education sector we are now looking forward to 260 smart schools across the state.
“We are looking forward to 260 Type-2 primary healthcare centres across all our wards in Enugu. It means that we are going to have radical infrastructural development.
