August 13, 2014 – Governor of Lagos state, Mr. Babatunde Fashola has sent a request to the Lagos State House of Assembly requesting that the 2014 budget of N489.69 be reordered to enable him meet up with demands for more public services from citizens which he said are sufficiently compelling and cannot wait until 2015.
The Lagos State Governor last week reduced tuition paid in Lagos State University (LASU) to N25,000 from between N193, 750 and N348, 750 in 2010.
The letter titled ‘Y2014 Budget Re-ordering of priorities’ was read at plenary by Clerk of the House, Ganiyu Abiru.
The governor said the request will take care of emerging issues like the reversal of LASU school fees policy “which 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 governor said.
He said the re-ordering will not affect the original budget size of N489.69 billion since it was discovered that there are still unutilized provisions by some MDAs, which may remain so till year end.
“Hence we are proposing to move such provisions to where they are more urgently needed to enable the state government address pressing needs” in the areas identified above and other areas like security housing etc”, he said.
Fashola is reordering the budget from Capital Expenditure Provisions of ten Agencies with a total value of N9.960billion.
“We have received request aggregating to the sum of N79.302billion but will clearly be unable to accommodate most of these request this year”, the governor said.
The request was debated briefly before it was committed to the House Committee on Economic Planning and Budget which will report to the House on Thursday because of the urgency of the issues involved.
