‘We Are Not Close To Our Limit’ – Sanwo-Olu Dismisses Worries About Lagos Debt Profile

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has dismissed worries in certain quarters about the rising debt profile of Lagos State.

Naijaonpoint reports Lagos State currently has the highest domestic debt in Q1 2024, with N929. 41 billion, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

However, speaking on the debt profile of Lagos during an interview on Wednesday with Channels TV, Governor Sanwo-Olu said there is nothing to be worried about concerning the debt profile of the state.

He explained that Lagos is still below the standard debt profile of a metropolitan city.

“The standard debt ratio that we are meant to meet standardly is about 40%, today we are less than 30, we are about 29 or 28% of those numbers, so we are not even close to it,” he said.

The Governor added that Lagos State has the strength and capacity to increase its budget.

“So the challenge around this N2 trillion is just a number. Indeed, the capacity of Lagos, we should be doing N20 trillion.

”In the last budget, when we pulled all of our numbers together, my people were saying to me that they wanted a budget of N6 trillion, but we could only do N2 trillion. That goes to show you the strength and capacity that the state has,” he said.

Sanwo-Olu said Lagos achieves 95 per cent budget performance every year, with the 2024 budget already 90 per cent gone.

“If you see what our budget growth has been in the last five years when we came in, we inherited a budget of about N620 billion, today Lagos State is doing about N2.3 trillion.

“We are probably going to close this year’s budget at about N2.5 trillion. We have tripled the budget of this state and mind you, we year-on-year we are doing about %95 budget performance, this year alone we are well over 90%,” the governor said.