Bauchi State governor Bala Mohamed on Monday signed the N42.8b supplementary appropriation bill recently passed by the State House of Assembly into law.
Governor Bala Mohammed while signing the budget, said the bill was submitted to him last Friday by the State Assembly.
“We’re today again making history in collaboration with the House of Assembly and the Government of Bauchi. The state is moving forward, we are presenting this as the only state in the federation to do a supplementation budget after COVID and this is an attestation that Bauchi is working.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be cowardly or vowed by the COVID-19, our timelines, milestones must be achieved and we are working as a government to make sure that all the deliverables are being delivered within the timeline”, the governor said.
The governor said his administration is giving special attention to the Internal Generated Revenue and will use it to borrow from the banks and not from the federal government pointing out that the state’s IGR has been raised by 300 percent since he assumed office as governor.
“We are not using our federation account to borrow this time around because we have exceeded the threshold for borrowing using our money from the federal government.
“We are now looking inwards making sure we save cost, all the wastages that we used to do in terms of ghost workers, in terms of lack of collection of IGR at the local government and at the state level have been put behind and we are now on the path of using our IGR to borrow money and execute projects and programmes that will put us on the paths of prosperity,” he said.
Mr Mohammed said that from the capital expenditure, his administration will embark on massive road constructions within the state capital and across the local government areas including the dualization of major roads in the city center.
The speaker of the State House of Assembly, Abubakar Y. Suleiman said the Assembly expedited passage of the bill to enable the governor continue with his laudable projects.
“The bill was presented to us last week Friday and because of our zeal just like the governor, we felt we should not waste much time in going through this document and then finally passing it into law.
“The entire members of the State Assembly are going in the same direction with the Governor and we are always ready to partner with you to play our own constitutional duty to ensure that the people of Bauchi state enjoy dividends of democracy”, Mr. Suleiman added.
