By Nnamani Arinze Darlington
Budget is a forecast by a government on its expected revenues and expenditures for a specific period of time. The period covered by a budget is usually a year, known as a financial or fiscal year, which may or may not correspond with the calendar year.
In tandem with constitutional provisions and tradition, governor of Enugu State, Dr. Peter Mbah, laid a budget estimate of N521.5bn for the 2024 fiscal year tagged ‘Budget of Disruptive Economic Growth’ before the Enugu State House of Assembly for the year 2024. Broadly speaking, the budget comprises capital expenditure of N414.3bn, representing 79 per cent of the budget and recurrent expenditure of N107.2bn, representing 21per cent of the budget. Notably also, education received 33 per cent of the budget.
As media reports show, economists, analysts, trade unions like the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), civil society organisations, and even some newspaper editorial boards (as represented by their editorials) have commended the budget as one with a human face and pro-masses. They believe that it represents an ambitious but realistic, inclusive, and sustainable policy document and prospective law capable of improving the lives of the people of Enugu State.
For instance, the United Nations Educational, Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), has always insisted that government should allocate between 15 and 20 per cent of its budget to the education sector, a benchmark that has been observed in gross breach. Governor Mbah’s budget allocation of N134.5b to education, surpasses the UNESCO benchmark. This is indeed a milestone for the people of Enugu. As the Enugu State Wing of the NUT rightly pointed out, it is a new day for education.
The 33 per cent on budgetary allocation to education will facilitate a reinvention and indeed a total overhaul of the education sector in the state. Already, the governor has started this process by a remarkable paradigm shift, as the administration has begun the construction and development of 260 smart schools across the various wards of the state. It is also reorganising the secondary and tertiary institutions by constant training and retraining of teachers in the state and overhauling the educational curriculum to enable the infusion of technology and technological skills across the whole strata of our educational sector.
The root of early deaths in Nigeria is the healthcare system that has virtually collapsed due to the lack of investment. Not long ago, the World Health Organisation survey ranked Nigeria’s healthcare system as the fourth worst in the world. As an Igbo one can only say ‘Tufiakwa’ to this shameful reality for a country that was the preferred health tourism destination for the Saudi Arabian royal family just a few decades ago.
At a time when people are generally living longer, with a global average life expectancy of 73 years, the average Nigerian will be lucky to attain the age of 60. With a life expectancy of 55 years, Nigeria is one of four countries with the lowest life expectancies in the world, after the Central African Republic, Lesotho, and Chad, based on the latest data from the United Nations. At the root of early deaths in Nigeria is a healthcare system that has virtually collapsed due to the lack of investment in our health care system.
Some have described Nigerian hospitals as a place where people go to die. It is difficult not to agree with them, given the shortage of drugs, equipment and medical specialists, and poor motivation of health workers that has triggered the worst ‘Japa syndrome’ in the health space in Nigeria’s history. Nigeria is now a breeding ground for medical personnel for foreign nations.
It is against this backdrop that the allocation of N21.7bn to health in the Enugu 2024 budget is commendable. This will help strengthen and enhance the state’s healthcare facilities and also expand access to quality healthcare services to those in both the urban areas and hinterlands. According to Mbah, the government will construct 260 world class Type-2 primary health centres across the 260 wards in the state, while every LGA is to get at least one fully digitised world class secondary health facility. Again, Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit has been a persistent source of concern and discourse over the years. Enugu’s infrastructure in particular is collapsed and, in fact, virtually non-existent. Yet infrastructure is important for faster economic growth and development, and poverty alleviation. Plus the provision and maintenance of infrastructures such as housing, roads, offices, industries, hospitals, educational buildings, waste processing centres, sewerage, drainages, recreation grounds, markets, parks, transport etc can be used to generate employment.
So, it is heartwarming that the Mbah administration’s 2024 budget sees infrastructural development as a catalyst for exponential economic growth. It has proposed N82.5bn for road construction, maintenance and rehabilitation of public building across the state. In fact, infrastructure is only second to education in terms of budgetary allocation.
Expectedly, Governor Mbah has received enormous accolades for the drastic cut in the cost of governance as demonstrated by the capital expenditure and recurrent expenditure ratios. At N107.2bn recurrent expenditure as against N414.3b capital expenditure components, Enugu is demonstrating a conspicuous downward spiral of recurrent expenditure.
Some doubters and naysayers have continued to ask questions of how the Mbah’s administration will generate revenue to fund the capital expenditure he proposed, especially since only 70 per cent of the entire N521.5bn budget is debt-funded. But nearly N300bn will come from Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
Also, the depth of the governor’s indicators support his fiscal plans. These include increasing the public private partnership with relevant investors; expanding the industrial base of the state through rapid industrialisation and harnessing untapped mineral resources in the state; providing an enabling environment for private sector to thrive; stimulating the agricultural and agro-allied industry to boost production of local farmers; increasing the domestic revenue base via the elimination of leakages; and sustaining an effective collaboration with security agencies and strengthening them to help de-risk investment for private investors.
These, among so many other initiatives by the governor, will serve as enabling catalysts that will seamlessly aid the positive performance of the budget. An impressive performance of the budget will also in turn help the administration achieve the audacious target to grow the state’s GDP from the current levels of $4.4b to $30b in the next 4-8 years. Indeed the 2024 Budget is critical to making Enugu one of the top three states in Nigeria in terms of gross domestic product and to also achieving a zero percent poverty head count index, being targets set by Governor Mbah for himself and his team. Ndi Enugu can only wish the Mbah administration the best.
•Nnamani, a political analyst, writes from Enugu