Kaduna state government is set to improve its internally generated revenue in 2020 from N44 billion in 2019 to N50 billion despite the Covid-19 pandemic, Governor Nasir el-Rufai has said.
Governor el-Rufai, who lamented the twin challenge of global health crisis in the form of Covid-19 and economic slowdown faced across Nigeria, said the state recorded N13 billion internally generated revenue in 2014 but raised it to N44 billion in 2019, while targeting N50 billion this year irrespective of the pandemic.
Addressing the 25th Annual Conference of Auditors-General of local governments in Kaduna on Tuesday, Governor el-Rufai, who was represented by Kaduna state Auditor-General of Local Government, Alhaji Atiku Musa, said following the lean resources and huge needs, there is need for transparency and accountability to ensure effective utilisation of resources.
“Kaduna state was adjudged the best in implementing SFTAS, having completed nine out of 11 key performance indicators. This follows our steady strides to increase our capacity to collect IGR. We have raised IGR from N13bn in 2015 to N44bn in 2019 without hiking tax rates. We are targeting N50bn as IGR in 2020 despite the Covid-19.
“The conference theme ‘Attaining Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability through better audit process’ is quite apt. It speaks to a pressing challenge within the public service as a whole to ensure that public resources are properly and judiciously deployed.
“This concern informed the creation in 1988 of the office of the auditor-general (local-governments) given the quantum of resources going to the Local Governments as a third tier of Government. It was considered that requiring the state auditor-general to audit both state and local governments account may overstretch that office and may result in inadequate attention being given to the accounts of local governments.
“While most professionals and workers have to work by the rules, auditors have a responsibility to help us comply with the rules, and that is the fundamental relationship between those who audit and those who are audited. Audits ensure the system is credible, dependable and even replicable.
“The Kaduna state government has placed accountability and transparency at the core of is governance reforms.
“That is why we implemented the Treasury Single Account in September 2015, and have automated our procurement process, began digitizing the land registry and prohibited cash collection of government revenues. We are the first state to sign up to the Open Government Partnership and we have real-time monitoring of our projects all around the state,” El-Rufai said.
