Kano tracker: N18 billion internal revenue generated by Kano in 2016

by Usman Alabi

The News Agency of Nigeria reported that Kano state generated N18 billion internally generated revenue from January to date.

Sani Dembo, the Chairman of Kano State Board of Internal Revenue, disclosed this on Thursday shortly after he defended the board’s 2017 budgetary allocation at the State Assembly. He said the board generated N11 billion as tax revenue in 2015 and N12 billion was realized in 2016

According to him, within 10 month of this year, the board generated non-tax revenue worth N6 billion, making the total of N18 billion generated. He added that some fund recoveries were made which are non-oil revenues which have contributed positively towards the boosting of the state revenue.

“The State Government had introduced harmonization system which dictates and streamlines the revenues of various State ministries and parastatals revenues into one treasury single account.”

But it is not enough to generate such an amount of money; the most important is what it is being spent on. Government at all levels should go beyond informing the citizens how much they were able to generate, but what such revenues was used for. Accountability and transparency is the essence of democratic government.

Every public official should consider giving stewardship of their time in office, that is it is essential that they consider accounting for every amount they generated. Beyond this, the process of generation and spending should be transparent in such a way that citizens can tell for themselves how much was generated and what it was spent on before government comes out with their official figures.

This can only be achieved through open government system which only very few state in Nigeria are sympathetic to.