The Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has urged the Federal Government to give Lagos an unique economic status on Thursday.
The governor, who referred to the state as a “national asset,” claimed that all Nigerians, regardless of geography, benefit in some way from the development of Lagos.
At the presentation of the 2023 budget estimates to the Lagos State House of Assembly in the Alausa neighborhood of Ikeja, the state capital, Sanwo-Olu made this known.
He presented the Budget Estimates of N1,692,670,759,894 with Recurrent as N759,958,569,792 (45%) and Capital being N932,712,190,102 (55%).
Christened the ‘Budget of Continuity’, the governor said its effective implementation will be for the benefit of all.
He said, “Lagos continues to experience increased pressure on social services due to unhindered migration from other parts of the country.
“It is for this reason that I always sought and I will still continue to reiterate the need for Lagos to be accorded a special status as a national asset.
“Lagos is too big for this country to allow it to fail. Lagos is too strategic for us not to see it that the wholesome of Lagos is the wholesome of this country, that the benefits of Lagos transcend one region, one part or one scope of this country.
“As a microsome of the entire country, Lagos deserves all the support it can get at the national level.”
The governor has already demanded that Lagos be granted special economic status. In June 2021, Sanwo-Olu requested the National Assembly to take special economic status for Lagos into account when rewriting the 1999 Constitution.
Also in October of that year, he argued that Lagos’ special status has multiplicative repercussions on the entire nation and wanted a 1% participation in the mechanism for allocating money.
Additionally, Sanwo-Olu urged the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) to change the revenue sharing formula to be 34% for the Federal Government, including 1% for the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of Abuja, 42% for State Governments, 23% for Local Governments, and 1% for Lagos State (special status).
Currently, the Federal Government gets 52.68 per cent, states get 26.72 per cent while local governments get 20.60 per cent.
Lagos, which has a population of nearly 20 million, generated the most internal revenue (IGR) in 2021 with N753.46 billion, followed by the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), which generated N131.92 billion.
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