Katsina spends N22bn on infrastructure in six months

Katsina State Government has disbursed over N22 billion as capital Expenditure in the first half of 2017, Governor Aminu Bello Masari, has disclosed. Masari, who spoke in an interactive session in Katsina with the governing council and management of Hassan Usman Katsina Polytechnic, said the government spent about N25 billion on capital projects last year out of the budgeted N75 billion while recurrent expenditure gulped about twice the capital expenditure. The governor also revealed that his administration would spend over three billion naira on primary education between this August and the end of the year to boost foundation level education towards sustainable improvement in the standard of education in the state. He noted that plans for local government poll in the state for the growth of democracy were underway and the State Independent Electoral Commission (SIEC) had spent N860 million on printing of election materials for the conduct of the poll. His administration, he said, has given local governments in the state in the past two years about N9.5 billion to enable them pay salaries following the cash crunch bedeviling the councils. Masari, who tasked the governing council and management of the institutions on strategic thinking especially on issues relating to security, manpower requirements and utilization of available resources, expressed appreciation for the polytechnic community’s support. In his remarks, the special adviser to the governor on higher education, Dr. Badamasi Charanchi, pointed out that the current administration expended N2.1 billion on salaries of the staff of the polytechnic in the last two years at an average of about N90 million per month. He assured the commitment of the Masari administration to uplift all frontiers of education as the education sector would remain the first priority of the government.