Cross River 2024 Budget performs 85 percent and 2025 will be 90 percent 

The Special Adviser to Governor Basssey Otu of Cross River State on Budget Monitoring and Evaluation, Otu Otu Ita, has said that the 2025 budget performance will be better than last year.
He said the last year’s budget performance was 85 percent, and the target this year is to achieve 90 percent performance.
It disclosed this at a five-day Capacity Building Worship on Medium Term Expenditure Framework Strategy Paper (MTE/FSP and Medium Term Sector Strategy (MTSS) held at Danic Hotel in Calabar, the Cross River State capital.
The workshop was sponsored by UNICEF as part of effort to build capacity for planning officers in Cross River State.
Ita said, “Basically, the main purpose of this workshop is to strengthen public finance management in Cross River State. Our expectation is that we are actually going to have a technical session where budget officers in Cross River State and planning recession statistics officers in Cross River State will be taught the rudiment of budgeting.
“We want to ensure that we have a plan-based budgeting in Cross River State where it will match our revenue to our expenditure where allocations of resources will not just be based on any assumption except on proper economic analysis.
‘That is why we are grateful to UNICEF for putting up this workshop. We are hoping that we will learn best practices in the course of this workshop. And then in terms of our budget performance, I think our budget performance, we want to review from maybe 2024 budget.
“Our 2024 budget performed was about 85%, and for the 2025 budget, we are currently implementing as at close of the business in second quarter of 2025, we had about 35% budget performance.
“So what is the prediction for this year? We are hoping that we will do about 90%.
“We are very, very hopeful because we had reason to review 2025 budget sometime in the month of June and that bill was signed into law in the month of August. And the reason why we had that new law is because we had new revenue projections and we had guarantee such as the revenue that were coming into Cross River State. So for that reason, we had a supplementary provision of about N104 billion.
“And for us, the supplementary means our budget is already performing and we are very, very optimistic that the programs in Cross River State which are all tailored to benefit and impact directly the people living in Cross River State will perform very well.
In his remarks, Victor Chiama, who represented Enugu Chief of Field Office for UNICEF Juliet Chilwe stated that the workshop, “we expect that budgetary allocations will be improved for these sectors. We expect that the priorities or activities and programs will be tailored towards the key elements of the state’s priorities and state development plan, and we expect that with more advocacy, there will be appropriate release of funds, and that implementation will be guided according to best practices”.