2022: Infrastructure, Education, Health top El-Rufai’s N233bn budget

Governor Nasir El-Rufai has presented the 2022 budget of N233 billion to Kaduna State House of Assembly, with a capital expenditure of N146 billion and recurrent spending of N87.6 billion.

The priorities of the 2022 estimates are on Education, Healthcare and Infrastructure, like previous budgets.

Giving a further breakdown of the N233 billion budget estimate, the governor disclosed that it has a capital to recurrent ratio of 63%: 37%.

El-Rufai noted that the 2022 estimates are slightly smaller than the 2021 budget of N237.52 billion, which had N157.56 billion as capital and N79.96 billion recurrent expenditure, a 66% to 34% capital to recurrent ratio.

Speaking during the presentation of the budget on Tuesday, El-Rufai pointed out that the allocations in the 2022 budget estimates reflect the political values and governance principles that have consistently guided the six previous budgets that his government has presented since 2015.

“Most of the capital spending will be in the Economic and Social Sectors, in keeping faith with our stated governance agenda. We propose to devote 76.8% of the capital budget to schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, including housing. Capital spending on Education is N68.4bn (29%) and for Health N35.1bn (15%),” he said.

According to the governor, “These figures show that the 2022 budget estimates express our political values and governance principles in the same consistent manner as our six previous budgets.

“Devoting N115 billion to these critical sectors demonstrates continuity in our emphasis on Education and Health as the key drivers of human capital development, and on investments in Infrastructure as essentials to promoting economic competitiveness, support job creation and advance the well-being of our people,” he argued.

El-Rufai said that the government is looking forward to the commissioning of the Gujeni iron and steel plant of the African Natural Resources and Mines in Kagarko LGA early in 2022.

“We also expect the Dangote-Peugeot vehicle assembly project and the OCP fertiliser plant located along the Kaduna-Abuja Road to come on stream,” the governor also promised.

He said that “without hiking tax rates, Kaduna State has become a top five state for Internally Generated Revenue in Nigeria, collecting N50.7 billion in taxes and levies in 2020. This is almost four times the N13 billion that the state collected as IGR in 2015.”

According to the governor, his administration expanded access to education, making the first 12 years of schooling free and compulsory, saving parents over N3 billion yearly in fees by making basic education free.

“We recently recruited 7,600 new teachers for secondary schools, in addition to the 2,500 teachers of English, Mathematics and the sciences earlier recruited. We continue to monitor the performance of the 25,000 recruited in 2017 and 2018 to replace the 22,000 who failed the competency test,” he added.