Kaduna cuts cost of governance by 60% – El-Rufa’i

Nasir El Rufa’i the executive governor of Kaduna State says his government has been able to cut expenditure by as much as 70 percent in the last two years. El Rufa’i disclosed this in an exclusive interview in BusinessDay published in today’s paper.

“In the 2015 budget we inherited, 75 percent of the budget was recurrent expenditure, by 2016, we had flipped it and made recurrent expenditure only 40 percent of the budget. We reduced the recurrent expenditure size by more than 50 percent, so effectively, we have cut the cost of government by between 60 and 70 percent, and we did not have to sack any one to do that, we just reduced the number of political appointees significantly, we blocked areas of leakages, scaled down on traveling, we looked at training programmes that were just jamborees, cancelled them and that is how we are able to achieve that.”

The governor gave an insight into some of the specific steps that the state had to take to cut down on government expenditure.

“So from day one, we recognised that we had to make the government smaller, we have to make the cost of governance much lower, so as to free resources for capital investment.

“While the previous government had 24 commissioners for example, we started with 13, so we shrank by nearly 50 percent, while the previous government had exactly 40 special advisers, we started with ten and we have had less than ten.”

“We got approval to appoint ten, but we have never had up to ten. So we consciously took steps to shrink the size of the government to make it lean, mean and fit for purpose.

“We scaled down significantly the recurrent budget of agencies. For instance, the 2015 budget for the Government House was over N2.2 billion, by 2016 the Government House budget had dropped to about N500 million, that is about 75 percent drop, and this is typical across the board. We reduced recurrent expenses to create space for capital, and we focused on improving the quality and scope of social services.”

Besides cutting costs, the state, he said, has also been able to boost its revenues significantly in the last two years.

“I think we have had some success, for instance our IGR was N11 billion in 2015 and jumped to N21 billion in 2016, so we nearly doubled our IGR within one yearbecause of the reforms we put in place and the establishment of the new Kaduna Internal Revenue Service. So our IGR is increasing significantly as a cushion for falling oil prices and falling inflows from the Federation”

The full interview with El Rufa’I, in which he speaks about the investment opportunities in the state and his target of making Kaduna the easiest place to do business in the world, is on pages 22 to 25 of today’s paper and also available online.