OGUN TARGETS N100BN IGR BEFORE END OF THE YEAR
By Lola Adeyinka
The Ogun State Government says it will continue to embark on initiatives and economic development policies that will boost its Internally Generated Revenue to about N100bn in the current year.
Commissioner for Finance and Chief Economic Adviser, Mr. Dapo Okubadejo who made the disclosure while speaking with newsmen on the sideline of the launch of the Ogun State Land Administration and Revenue Management System (OLARMS), in Abeokuta also revealed that the State’s IGR hit N74bn as at September, 2021.
Okubadejo, who described OLARMS as a revolutionary technological initiative in the management of land resources in the country, maintained that the initiative has the capacity to raise the rating of the State in the Ease of Doing Business index.
“We are on a trajectory to massively increase the revenue base of Ogun State. As at September, we have already recorded N74bn in Internally Generated Revenue, and by the grace of God, we are hoping that with all these initiatives we are introducing, the revenue base of Ogun State will continue to increase. This year, if we are not doing up to N100bn, we will be very close, and it is because of all these initiatives
“We’ve done it in Land Use and Amenities Charge, we are introducing Public utilities platforms for the management of public infrastructure like towers, fibre optic cables etc, and now we have OLARMS which we think is one of the biggest initiatives, and this is about the first, if not the first in Nigeria where a dedicated platform has been developed to ease administration of land and encourage people to acquire land transparently wherever they are in the world”, the Commissioner added.
On the uncompleted applications for the Home Owners Charter by the last administration, Okubadejo hinted that the backlog of applications, totaling about 150,000 had already been digitised by the current administration for easy processing through the OLARMS platform.
“OLARMS is not just for acquisition of land by the way. The Home Owners Charter by the last administration was a very laudable programme, but we have lot of cases of uncompleted applications. So many people running into hundreds of thousands have not had their documents fully processed.
We have digitized all these documents, put them on OLARMS. People will now have the opportunity to come and complete their Home Owners Charter process once that module is activated” Okubadejo said.