LASU: Fashola wants reordering of 2014 budget

THe Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, has requested the reordering of the year 2014 Budget.

The governor said the initiative was to meet the public service demands that were sufficiently compelling and could not wait till 2015.

In a letter titled, ‘Y2014 Budget: Re-ordering of Priorities’, signed by the governor and addressed to the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Fashola requested the reordering to take care of what he described as emergencies.

The letter, which was read at the plenary yesterday by the Clerk of the Assembly, Ganiyu Abiru, explained that the reordered budget would take care of the emerging issues like the Lagos State University school fees reversal, among others.

The letter stated that the LASU school fees reversal “requires us to make provisions to cover LASU shortfall in projected revenues in order to service the school; the unanticipated but very urgent need to address the threat of the Ebola virus epidemic and also a need for counterpart funding request that enables us to access developmental funds to install solar power panels in 172 public schools and 11 primary health centres in the first phase.”

The letter added, “The reordering will not affect the original budget size of N489.69bn as we have discovered that there are still unutilised provisions by some MDAs, which may remain so till the end of the year.

“Hence, we are proposing to move such provisions to where they are more urgently needed to enable the state government address pressing needs.”

The reordering, according to Fashola’s letter, is proposed from Capital Expenditure Provisions of 10 agencies with a total value of N9.960bn.

“We have received request aggregating to the sum of N79.302b, but will clearly be unable to accommodate most of these request this year,” the letter added.

After debating the issue, the request was given to the House Committee on Economic Planning and Budgeting to study.

The committee was told to report back to the Assembly on Thursday (today) because of the urgency of the issue

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