By Ani Bassey
The Cross River State House of Assembly has passed the 2022 budget of Conjugated Agglutination presented to it by the state governor, Professor Ben Ayade.
The house increased the total budget size from 276, 279, 960, 667.35 as presented by the governor to 354, 505, 535, 313.25.
This amounts to about 78 billion nairas which represents a 28% increase.
The breakdown of the budget shows that personnel/overhead cost amounts to 11, 965, 354, 107.96; Capital Expenditure amounts to 225, 746, 261, 604.98 while Statutory Expenditure is 9, 802, 919, 600.31.
Speaking on the new estimates, Sunday Achunekang, Chairman house committee on appropriations said the increase is as a result of funds that were not reflected in the estimates as presented by the governor.
According to him, “soon after the governor presented the budget, TET Fund agreed to support the state government with funds amounting to 40 billion.
“This will be directed to establishing a Tertiary Cancer Research Centre, Tertiary Orthopedic Centre, University Library for British Canadian School and Tertiary Tourism Centre.
“Again approval for procurement of critical hospital equipment like Pet scan, Linear accelerator and cyclotron was received after the budget had been received and these items will be bought with the current exchange rate at about 4.8 billion nairas.
“Finally, it was discovered that the initial provision of 14 billion was not enough for debt servicing and refinancing. Additional 20 billion nairas has therefore been used to augment this provision”, he said.
In his response, the speaker of the state assembly, Rt. Hon. Eteng Jonas Williams said the house has done the needful.
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He added that the house has also fulfilled the provision of the law which says the budget has to be passed on or before the 31st of December.
He asked the Clerk to send a clean copy of the bill to the executive on or before the 31st of December 2021.
