BUDGIT will release its annual State of States report before the end of this quarter. The State of States report will look at the fiscal state of the 36 states of Nigeria, the challenges they are facing and proffer feasible solutions to some of these difficulties.

Atiku Samuel, research lead at BudgIT, said his team had been working on it since the first week of January. “We’re done with all the research and we covered virtually all the states in the federation. We sent letters to the various states requesting information; some were very cooperative while some were a little less forthcoming.”

Nevertheless, he said: “Whether we like it or not, there are other ways of getting the necessary information. What we are doing with the State of States report is using the information we have, to do a comparative analysis of the states, especially around their fiscal policies, that is their spending structure, what their revenues and expenditures look like and so on.”

Samuel said the states were becoming more cooperative. “When we sent out the letters in January, some states like Gombe and Anambra were pretty responsive giving us some information, but as I said, we were able to find information regardless of whether a state helped us.”

He said this year 21 states submitted their budgets to his team. This was a massive increase from eight last year and five in the initial State of States report. “We are improving, and we will get there.”

Samuel said the analysis was critical. “We need to look at the context, people always look at the federal government when it comes to the budget, but the federal level only accounts for about 45 percent of total spending. State and local government, which is primarily controlled by the state government anyway, takes up the majority. The federal government spent N176 billion on capital items, while state government spent close to N800 billion. Therefore there is more likely to be theft at state level, which needs greater transparency.”

According to Samuel the information the research team has been compiling is to find the degree the states’ revenue is affecting their expenditures, whether they running a recurrent expenditure surplus, if they are borrowing to pay salaries and whether they can even pay salaries. “Our focus is on things around this space as well as trying to find out what opportunities there are, if any, to mitigate the fiscal challenges the states maybe facing, hopefully, it should be out before the end of this quarter,” he said.

–  Sept 11, 2017 @ 12:53 GMT