By AbdulRaheem Aodu
Kaduna
Kaduna state government has set machinery in motion to achieve its targeted N4 billion monthly internally generated revenue to cover for the dwindling federal allocation, Governor Nasir El-Rufai has said.
He said the state got over N5 billion federal allocation in their first month in office but that has decreased to N2.8 billion in February 2016 which may just cover the workers salary leaving nothing for development and other vital aspects of governance hence the improvement of their IGR.
“What we saw clearly in June was that unless we did something to reduce the cost of governance, we would end up being a government that only pays salary from month to month and nothing more, which was what the previous government ended up becoming in the last few months because they could not make the adjustment.
“But on the other hand, we are also raising revenue. In December 2015, we collected N224million naira as Internally Generated Revenue. In January, we started blocking leakages by saying no cash payments. We deployed POS to hospitals because people complained of hospitals telling them to go to banks to make their payment.
“After blocking these leakages, we raised N1.2billion in January and in February, it increased to about N2billion. It is looking like this year, we are going to be raising about N3billion to N4billion a month by the time all the policies are put in place and settled.
So, we are generating more internal revenue than depending on the federation account. You can’t cut personnel cost. You can verify, remove ghost workers but salaries and pensions are fixed cost and you have to pay that every month. Unless pensioners die, the pension keeps on increasing.
