2009 Budget Speech - Protocols

Budget of Accelerated Growth

Nov 10, 2008 - Mr. Speaker, Honourable Members of the Lagos State House of Assembly,

It is a great honour and privilege for me to present the Y2009 budget estimates to this Honorable House. In doing so, I sincerely thank members of the Lagos State House of Assembly for working constructively with the executive to achieve the objectives of our Administration. We have clearly articulated our vision and have been very focused in the pursuit of our goals. Our objective is to transform Lagos into Africa’s model Mega city; to build a world class city state that is clean, secure, livable, functions efficiently and enables the people to express their potentials.

Over the last 500 days since our assumption of office, we have worked tirelessly to deliver on our mandate through the rigorous implementation of our Ten Point Agenda. The budget is one principal instrument for achieving our objectives and our administration takes the budgetary process very seriously. The emphasis of the Y2008 budget on capital expenditure reflects our determination to overhaul our infrastructure and create the requisite framework for accelerated and sustainable development.

We have run government like a public corporation and closely monitored the implementation of the budget by holding a fortnightly revenue meeting from January to date and a quarterly review meeting of performance and enforced budgetary compliance. As at the end of the first quarter, the overall performance of our Budget was 60%; at the second quarter it was 70.65%; while at the third quarter it was 71.145. The trend of our Budget performance has been progressively upward and we are optimistic to close the year with a performance level of at least 80%.

This objective informed the re-ordering of our budgetary allocations, which this Honorable House recently enacted. An overview of our performance in the current year shows that our efforts are yielding positive results as we made commendable progress in the implementation of our Ten Point Agenda. Although the progress of your government and the budget implementation has been constantly reported in our 300, 400 and 500 hundred day progress reports, I will again briefly review some of our performance highlights for the year.

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