Abia State Governor, Dr Okezie Ikpeazu has presented the sum of N136.618 billion to the state’s House of Assembly as the Government’s 2020 budget. The budget is tagged “Budget of Economic Re-positioning”.
The breakdown of the budget shows that the governor allocated N66.802 billion or 48.90% as Recurrent Expenditure and N69.815 billion, about 51.10% as Capital Expenditure.
Speaking on the budget, the Governor, according to The Guardian, said the budget outlay is slightly less than that of 2019 budget of about N140.945 billion, adding that the moderate decrease was occasioned by his government’s resolve to formulate a realistic budget while working hard to improve revenue generation and expenditure management approach.
Ikpeazu made known that his administration was working towards partnership with stakeholders to bring about different results from the 2019 budget implementation.
”We are adopting an innovative approach towards engagement of resources and partnership with stakeholders to bring about different results.
“We must be bold in our approach. In addition to engaging a wide variety of stakeholders and potential beneficiaries in the preparation of the budget, we also adopted a unique complementation of executive and bureaucratic exigencies in the identification and pooling of priorities, the planning of resource engagement and the methodologies for achieving results.”
[READ MORE: Senate to pass 2020 budget on November 28, breaks eleven-year jinx)
While further commenting on the budget, the governor stressed that the effort of his administration to make the environment better and habitable had achieved some levels of progress.
“Our recent efforts towards improving Environmental Sanitation have not been without results. The repositioning of the Environmental Sanitation Agency and the creation of Environmental Sanitation Agencies at city levels are aimed at making them more responsive towards the local waste management situation.
“Government has invested significant amounts in equipping and helping them change the narrative in waste management. The results for both Aba and Umuahia have been quite encouraging. We pledge that the unbundling of our waste management Agency will be complete before the end of 2019.”
