Rivers, Ebonyi, Anambra top overall in fiscal performance – BudgIT

The state with an Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) plus VAT of 139, 762,130,401, total revenue of 270,378,440,333, operating expenses of 113,649,262,851, operating expenses plus loan repayments of 129,661, 453,859 and capital expenditure of 168,359,956,753 ended the year 2020 with a total debt of 303,681,058,491.

This is in comparison with Lagos state that ranks 4th on the list with an IGR plus VAT of 549,958,774,901, total revenue of 658,563,824,000, operating expenses plus loan repayments of 536,342,204,000 and capital expenditure of 304,986,590,000 with a total debt of 1,043,242,927,772.

This is according to BudgIT’s report on states fiscal performance ranking index, launched yesterday in Abuja. The report was titled, ‘State of states 2021 edition, fiscal options for building back better.’

Head, Research and Policy Department BudgIT, Abel Akeni who gave a breakdown of the report said: “From our assessment of the 36 states, based on our evaluation of how they prioritize their expenditure and their revenue generation capacity, we have seen that certain states have more capacity to meet some of their expenditure obligations than others. We have a whole methodology which we use in evaluating states performance and with the methodology, we arrived at a ranking for all the states and in it, Rivers state comes first, meaning it is performing well in all the four indexs we used for the model.

“Rivers state has a solid IGR generating capacity, they are also able to prioritize capital expenditure better than their recurrent expenditure, they were one of the five states in the country that spent more on capital expenditures than recurrent. Ebonyi significantly prioritized expenditure, it spent more on capex than its operating expenses and that is something that we will like to encourage for several states.

“The others are Anambra, Lagos and Kebbi. Ebonyi and Kebbi are new entrants into this year’s top five and it is largely because of improvement in their IGR. For the bottom five we have Adamawa, Kastina, Benue, Taraba and Bayelsa and it is largely because of its high operating expenses, the high cost of running the government in Bayelsa, compared to their revenue generating capacity. It has the third highest operating expenses in the country after states like Lagos and Delta and the question is what is driving its large operating expenses?”