Katsina residents travel for an hour to access health facilities – Commissioner

The Katsina State Commissioner for health, Mrs Mariatu Bala Usman has disclosed that people travel for an hour to access health facilities in the state.

She gave this disclosure at an interactive meeting with the Senate Committee on Foreign Loans and Local debts in Abuja, saying that the situation had led to 180 child mortality rate every month.

She noted that past administrations did not do well across the state, a situation she explained, led to the collapsed of health care system.

“We have 24 local governments in Katsina state and past administrations did not judiciously apply part of loans they borrowed in the health care sector”, she said.

Katsina state Commissioner for Finance, Alhaji Mukhtar Abdulkadir told the Committee that part of the World Bank loan of 110 million dollars which the state seeks to borrow would be channeled into health sector.

In response to inquiries about the state’s debt profile, he disclosed that the current government inherited 74 million dollars the state owed foreign agencies, while N24 billion was domestic debt.

He said they were servicing the loan with N316 million monthly, while about N6 billion has been saved from the last Paris Club loan.

“Our internally generated revenue stands at N510 million monthly, while we are able to pay debts of N316 million monthly; we have so far saved N6 billion from the last Paris Club loan”, the Commissioner noted.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of the Committee, Senator Shehu San has asked northern States to look outside the box in growing their internally generated revenues, adding that if revenues were improved at the state level, it would lessen agitations.

“It is high time northern States woke up in icreasing their IGR so that agitations being experienced in some States would be none existent if Internally Generated Revenues are improved upon and States depend less on allocations shared in Abuja monthly”‎, he said.

He also expressed concerns that some states in the country had obtained loans and were doing little or nothing to offset such loans.

“We need to sit up in terms of knowing that there is a cloud gathering in the sky, the agitations going on in some states should tell us that we need to brace ourselves to what is ahead.

“If we reach the point where IGR of some state gets to one billion, most of these issues will disappear; it is unhealthy for some states to depend on what comes from Abuja”, he added.‎

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