The Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has said his administration envisaged a N240bn revenue decline in the state, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Sanwo-Olu said this during his keynote address at the 10th annual public lecture of the Lagos State Public Service Chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria tagged ‘The Global Economic Realities of COVID-19 Pandemic, Lagos State as a Case Study,’ on Thursday.
The governor, who was represented by the state Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Samuel Egube, noted that though the 2020 budget had contingency plans, it did not account for the unforeseen pandemic.
Sanwo-Olu said, “If one accounts for something without an action, then one’s proper accounting has not been done because the whole idea of accounting is, first, to account for things, but by nature of the way one has done so, it should be clear to one what kind of actions one should take.
“Once we saw it (COVID-19 pandemic), it was clear that there was going to be an economic consolidation. We saw that our potential revenue might go down by about N240bn.
“We saw that, if we moved and slashed that completely across the board, we would have missed the plot because it was going to be important to us to properly account for what was happening at present and what the effect of that would be.” (Punch)