By Junaid Abdullahi
Some Ekiti residents under the auspices of the Ekiti Tax for Service have vowed to ensure that the N1.4 billion earmarked for the Ekiti International Cargo Airport in the 2024 budget, is properly utilised.
The Tax for Service policy group which is made up of artisans, NUT, hotelier/saw miller group, CSO, NBA, market women, and traditional chiefs, among others, said tax payment would become voluntary and easy to collect by the government if citizens are aware of how their money was spent.
The group’s chairman, Prof. Christopher Oluwadare stated this on Wednesday at the unveiling of the Ekiti State Tax for Service Group Demand in the 2024 Budget, which was facilitated by the New Initiative for Social Development (NISD) in partnership with the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room and UK International Development.
According to Oluwadare, parts of the focus of the group included the N1.4 billion budgeted for the completion of the Ekiti International Cargo Airport and the money budgeted for Youth/Farmer empowerment and subvention to farmers.
Others included the money allocated for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, rehabilitation of Markets across the state, sustainable Urban / Rural water supply, sanitation and hygiene, among others.
He said: “Tax is compulsory because the government expects citizens to pay tax. But the tax will be voluntary and easy to collect if people who are mandated to pay tax can point to one thing or the other that the taxes they paid are used for.
“This project is to help sell government visions and projects in tax collection. This is so especially now that the federal government and other sub-national entities are trying to increase their Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) because they cannot continue to rely on oil money or many coming from Abuja for payment of salaries and execution of projects.
“The stakeholders are coming together to look at various aspects of the budget as it concerns their members and monitor the implementation. We are building our capacity on how to monitor projects so that at the end of the day, we can now say where the project is located.
“We will be meeting continuously; we will visit all the MDAs to raise our observations about the implementation of the budget. We will say this is our observation, this thing is captured in your budget and we have not seen anything, are you saying that money has not been released for it? In doing so we will get feedback on the state of the projects, if there is a need to escalate it, we will invite the media and inform them of our observations.
“If a road is to be constructed and it is captured in the 2024 budget and by August, nothing has been done, we will march to the Ministry of Works to demand why it has not started.”
