The Cross River State House of Assembly has passed the 2022 appropriation bill tagged “Budget of Conjugated Agglutination” into law with a 28.32 percentage increase.
The new budget figures for 2022 now stand at N354,505, 535,313.25k (Three Hundred and Fifty Four Billion, Five and Five Million, Five Hundred and Thirty Five Thousand, Three Hundred Thirteen Naira Twenty Five Kobo) as opposed to N276, 279, 960, 667.35k earlier presented to the Assembly by the governor of Cross River State, south-south Nigeria, Governor Ben Ayade.
On the increment to the budget, the Speaker of the House, Mr. Eteng Williams gave detailed explanation: “We discovered that provisions for certain sectors were not captured in the budget. Provisions for the University of Cross River State, UNICROSS; even the 40 Billion Naira funds received from TETFund –Tertiary Education Trust Fund – was not captured.
“There was no provision for training for even House of Assembly, no provision for even the Office of the Auditor General. Then in Teacher Training school in Biase local government area, there was no single provision for that school, which has legal backing and people employed to work there.
“We have made provisions for the lapses we observed. In fact, that the reason for holding the public hearings. We worked throughout the holidays to address every sector of the 2022 budget in details. We discovered that so many Ministries, Departments and Agencies did not make provisions for personnel cost.
“How can salaries be paid when it is not appropriated for? For us as a House, we must take care to examine critically every sector in the budget. A worker deserves his/her pay and so to omit personnel cost would mean that person would and cannot be paid. It must be in the Appropriation Law and we are satisfied that with this law, the desires and aspirations of the people would be met,” stressed Williams.
Adhering to fiscal transparency
Prior to the passage of the budget sequel to its third reading on the floor of the House, the Chairman of the Committee on Finance and Appropriation, Mr. Sunday Achunekang presented its report to the legislators.
Achunekang commended members of Civil Society Organisations and the executives for assisting the committee with relevant data, which translated to the corrections and provisions made to the appropriation law.
During his presentation, the House Committee Chairman noted “Cross River is one of the States that has keyed into the fiscal transparency, accountability and sustainability plan. After the public hearing there was need to increase the budget size to correct shortfalls, take in new items or reconsider inflows and expenditure pattern contained therein.”
The Committee Chairman urged the Cross River Board of Internal Revenue Service to block leakages to enhance budget financing, noting “we identified leakages in the IGR and we have been able to spell them all out. It is our hope that in 2022 all those leakages will be taken care of and we will be able to handle them properly whereby our revenue generated would be channeled to the right sources, which would give us the strength and courage to implement what we have set out for 2022.”
He said it has been sent to the governor, Professor Ayade for accent.
Lateefah Ibrahim
