TheCable

Kayode Fayemi, governor of Ekiti and chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), has asked his colleagues to share details of their local government budgets and financial statements in addition to state government data already published.

Fayemi said this in a communique issued after NGF’s teleconference meeting on Wednesday.

The communiqué said Fayemi briefed the forum on an ongoing consolidation exercise between NGF and the Budget Office of the Federation to consolidate public finance data of the federal, states, and local governments into a national budget portal.

The NGF also pledged to put the necessary legal framework and institutions in place for the states fiscal transparency accountability and sustainability (SFTAS).

The SFTAS, launched in 22018, is supported by the World Bank to incentivise states to properly achieve the nine disbursement linked indicators (DLIs) under the programme.

It is a $750m programme of the federal government to reward states for meeting any or all of nine indicators that demonstrate improvements in fiscal transparency, accountability and sustainability.

NGF also agreed on the need for states to meet the SFTAS obligations.

It said the World Bank at the meeting requested governors’ additional support in areas such as the adoption of a fund release policy for improved predictability of resources flow to the COVID-19 action recovery and economic stimulus – programme for results (CARES – PoR) delivery ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).

The Bank called for governors’ support on adoption and institutionalisation of protocols for reporting, management and investigation of fraud and corruption in MDAs implementing CARES.

It further called on governors’ support for the release of 2021 state budgets to MDAs for the commencement of CARES-related activities.

“The Bank also urged the support of governors to ensure that their ministries of finance and ministries of justice fast track the execution of subsidiary agreements for the CARES programme,” the communique read.

NGF said updates on the SFTAS programme showed that targets for results and disbursements on the 2018 and 2019 annual performance assessments (APA) and new COVID-19 2020 disbursement linked indicators (DLIs) had been exceeded.

“For the SFTAS 2020 APA and new COVID-19 DLIs, all 36 states are on track to fully meet the eligibility criteria of having National Chart of Account (NCOA) compliant FY2021 budget published online by Jan. 31, 2021.

“Under the SFTAS Programme for Results, 23 States have already passed strong state-level debt legislation.”

The forum, however, said a strong collective commitment was made for the remaining 13 States to pass such state-level debt legislation by December 31, 2021.