Why Katsina’s 2027 Budget Is A Fiscal Emergency -By Aliyu Sulaiman Babasidi

Looking at the Katsina State 2027 budget proposal of about 800 billion Naira, I immediately magnified the breakdown to see how much was projected as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). It stands at about 96 billion Naira. That is a mere one-tenth of all the money the state intends to spend. Even this 96 billion is an ambitious, overly optimistic projection. Not once in the last three budget cycles has Katsina been able to hit its revenue target as passed into law.

This absolute dependence on the center for capital and recurrent sustenance is not unusual. All but one (Lagos, of course) of the 36 states and the FCT would be utterly unable to stand on their own feet without the engorged Federation Account (FAAC) shared on a monthly basis. The Federal Government itself relies heavily on the sale of crude oil, which exists on an elastic, volatile demand and supply calculation.

It is not the composition of the budgetary allocations that bothers me for now. It is something much bigger, much more frightening. Why is my state, and by extension, my region, unable to fund its shallow budget by at least 50 percent?

That the global political economy is dynamic should ordinarily keep us traumatized. But now, the pace of these global changes is faster and more consequential than ever before. Ongoing foreign wars, the reducing reliance on fossil fuels by advanced countries, and the geometric rise in third-world populations have combined to make our future highly unpredictable. And largely, not in a good way.

As a professional operating within corporate compliance, this structural blindness strikes a terrifyingly familiar chord. Katsina is behaving exactly like a bank staff member who earns a handsome monthly salary but completely fails to plan for the future. Such a professional builds no alternative income streams, relies entirely on a single employer, and willfully ignores the shifting tides of the industry. When the inevitable corporate restructuring or retrenchment happens, they are blindsided or dislodged from comfort and reduced to a beggar in no time.

Our inability as a state to think outside the box for innovative, sustainable triggers for economic prosperity is nothing short of a state of emergency. I am not kidding. Believing that the center will continue to bail us out year-in, year-out is an illusion that we must snap out of immediately. We have had enough talk of ‘untapped potentials.’

Now, back to the budget proposal. Is it actually “building our future”? Or is it just an optical illusion designed to massage the egos of the powers that be? For me, the answer is both yes and no.

Nine hundred billion Naira is, in itself, not as adequate as we think it is when taking everything into account. A severely devalued currency and the skyrocketing cost of goods and services mean all these billions will only chase fewer results. Even the cement needed to construct classrooms and roads now costs four times what it did four years ago. You get the picture. Secondly, while governors carried out a superficial liposuction on the financial realities of civil servants to implement a new minimum wage, workers enjoyed a salary increase in arithmetic progression, while the governors watched their own federal allocations improve in geometric progression.

Since the days of Mungo Park and through the reign of colonial masters, Northern Nigeria has been praised for its monumental agricultural potentials. This rhetoric has lingered until today, and I leave you to guess whether this potential has ever been remotely met. Looking through the repetitive, unindustrious revenue sources available to Katsina, I stumbled upon an item that could be an absolute goldmine. Thankfully, Governor Dikko Umaru Radda is looking somewhat in that direction. But while he created a Ministry for Rural Economy, the real money-maker and game-changer lies elsewhere: the urgent need to create a well-oiled, institutionally backed Livestock Development and Commercialization Agency.

This is a no-brainer. This is the industrial future Mallam Umaru Dikko Radda should be building. A dedicated agency, likely to be incorporated as a profit-making entity, has the potential to turn Katsina into a model subnational entity, and I am not talking merely about the usual political rhetoric.

To complement this agrarian modernization, the state must aggressively prioritize and fast-track the execution of the Funtua Inland Dry Port. The dry port cannot be viewed as a mere transport project; it is a vital fiscal artery. By ensuring strict regulatory and infrastructural compliance, Katsina can pull maritime clearing operations directly into the North-West, bypass coastal bottlenecks, and tap into the lucrative cross-border West African trade. The trickle-down effect on direct revenue generation and job creation for our youth would be monumental.

True development will not come from building infrastructure that looks sophisticated in political pamphlets while our treasury remains on life support from Abuja. We must build alternative streams of income today, or risk waking up as the proverbial retrenched worker tomorrow. Allah ya sauwake, amin.