Governor Obaseki signs 2022 appropriation bill into law

Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State has signed the 2022 appropriation bill of N222.6 billion into law.

The budget, christened Budget of Renewal, Hope and Growth, is an increase of about N8.4 billion over the N214. 2 billion initially presented to the state assembly.

The governor, who signed the budget at the Exco Chambers in Government House, Benin, on Wednesday, commended the leadership of the state assembly for giving speedy consideration to the bill.

He expressed gratitude for the cooperation being received from the House and noted the marginal increase in the size of the appropriation bill presented to the lawmakers when it was passed.

“Knowing that next year is likely to be an inflationary year, with the trend we see today, we see the naira weakening further, which means we need enough naira to accomplish the same set of things we did last year.

“So, we understand the wisdom in you now increasing the bill that we brought to you.

“We also want to thank you that even as you made that adjustment, most of that adjustment went into capital expenditure, rather than recurrent expenditure, which now puts our capital expenditure at an all-time high relative to recurrent expenditure.

“We really want to thank you for aligning with our dream of Making Edo Great Again.

“Except we spend more money on capital expenditure, we cannot take our people out poverty,’’ he said.

Mr Obaseki appreciated the House for allocating more funds to youth development, technical education, building of more technical schools, particularly in Edo North, and a bit more money in sports development.

“We want to assure you that as an executive arm, we are fine-tuning the government’s Internally Generated Revenue because that is the trick in attaining this budget size.

“We are pretty confident that Edo people want to pay tax and we want to make sure that the taxes they pay go into government coffers for developmental purposes,” he said.

Earlier, the Speaker, Edo House of Assembly, Marcus Onobun, said they worked to speed up passage of the bill.

He said the lawmakers slightly increased the budget size from the initial amount to the size which was passed into law.

(NAN)