Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State on Thursday presented a 2016 budget proposal of N662.58 billion to the Lagos State House of Assembly for approval.
Ambode, who tagged the budget “The People’s Budget”, said that it would promote massive investment in security, transport/traffic management, physical and social infrastructural development as well as enhance job creation.
The budget is made up of capital expenditure of N383.678 billion and a recurrent expenditure of N278.909 billion in the ratio of 58:42 respectively as against 51:49 in 2014 and 2015.
“This represents an improvement of 26 per cent over the budgets of 2014 and 2015 respectively, which stood at N489.69 billion,” Ambode said.
The News Agency of Nigeria recalls that the N489.69 billion year 2015 budget was later reordered and signed into law on September 23, 2015.
The reordered budget comprised N19.7 billion capital expenditure and N5.7billion recurrent expenditure within the initial budget size.
Ambode said that the total revenue estimate for 2016 fiscal year was N542.87billion.
He said that this showed that the balance of N119.71billion would be funded through deficit financing that would be 0.41 per cent of the state GDP based on 2016 budget alone and a cumulative debt to GDP ratio of about 3 per cent.
The budget breakdown revealed that Economic Affairs had the highest allocation of N211,04 billion followed by General Public Services, N120,50 billion.
Education and Health had N113.37 billion and N64.67 billion respectively.
Housing and Community Housing and Community Amenities got N62.71 billion while Environment got N53.04 billion and Public Order and Safety N28.55 billion.
Others are Recreation, Culture and Religion, N4.63 billion and Social Protection N4.02 billion.
Ambode said that the 2016 budget would be used to strategically build new infrastructure, while existing ones would be maintained.