BudgIT Retracts Report On ‘ Fiscal Sustainability’, Apologises To Lagos

BudgIT, a civic tech organisation has tendered apology to Lagos state government over the ranking of the state as incapable of meeting their loan repayment obligation, as published in its recently released State of States report.

BudgIT’s State of States report is a snapshot of the fiscal health of all 36 states in the country, and it uses four metrics or stress tests to provide a fair overall sustainability ranking.

The report had listed Lagos, Oyo, Kogi and Osun as top states with huge fiscal deficits in 2019.

According to Gabriel Okeowo, BudgIT chief executive officer and principal lead, no single metric, when isolated, provides a fair assessment of any state; and none of the tests used evaluates the state’s fiscals for insolvency.

“Our metrics focused on NET FAAC and IGR as published by the National Bureau of Statistics due to the disparate nature of revenue framework among Nigerian states,” he said in a post via Twitter on Sunday.

“We also apologise for including a special debt financing program as part of the recurrent expenditure which might be a total representation of its finances.

“A previous graphic on the ability of states to meet their recurrent expenditure is hereby retracted.

“We affirm that Lagos State remains way ahead of many of its peers in terms of fiscal health and the capacity to generate revenue internally; and it also has the least dependency on federally collected revenue distributed through FAAC.