‘We Are Still Within Our Limit’, Sanwo-Olu Dismisses Lagos Debt Worries

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News Across Nigeria Thursday, October 17th, 2024

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – Governor Babjide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State has dismissed worries in some quarters over the rising debt profile of the state, saying that Lagos is still within the standard debt ratio.

Lagos currently stands as the highest debtor among the federating units in Nigeria either foreign or local.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, Lagos State recorded the highest domestic debt in Q1 2024 with N929. 41 billion, followed by Delta with N334.

“The standard debt ratio that we are meant to meet standardly is about 40%, today we are less than 30, we are about 29 or 28% of those numbers, so we are not even close to it.”

Back in February, the governor had stated that the state had the capacity to endure a burden of N20 trillion indicating that this should be seen as an investment for the future.

“So the challenge around this N2 trillion is just a number. Indeed, the capacity of Lagos, we should be doing N20 trillion.

”In the last budget, when we pulled all of our numbers together, my people were saying to me that they wanted a budget of N6 trillion, but we could only do N2 trillion. That goes to show you the strength and capacity that the state has”. he said.

The governor also said that the state had grown its budget exponentially in the last five years when he came in as governor.

According to him, Lagos achieves 95 per cent budget performance every year, with this year’s budget already 90 per cent gone.

“If you see what our budget growth has been in the last five years when we came in, we inherited a budget of about N620 billion, today Lagos State is doing about N2.3 trillion.

“We are probably going to close this year’s budget at about N2.5 trillion. We have tripled the budget of this state and mind you, we year-on-year we are doing about %95 budget performance, this year alone we are well over 90%,” the governor said.