The Accountant General of the Federation managed to claim at the end of January that the “limited nature of government revenue” meant the Federal Government could no longer afford to pay the monthly allowance of N35,000 promised to Federal workers. She was lying. In reality, the state and Federal governments have more money than they know what to do with.
Last year the Federal and state governments received more oil money than for any year for at least a decade. At the January and February 2024 FAAC meetings the revenue distributed was 25% more than even last years’ record average. At the February meeting they could have distributed twice as much revenue, but decided to save this surplus in the Excess Crude Account.
In addition, the IMF has reported that the Federal Government has seen as significant increase in its non-oil income as the following graph shows. The blue area shows oil revenue and the grey area non-oil revenue with a large increase over the last three years:
In addition, there is the money claimed to be saved from ending the fuel subsidy. This was said to be over N4 trillion in 2022 and N3.4 trillion in the first half of 2023. This is equivalent to around 15% of the budget for 2024. What happened to all these savings?
The official rate of exchange of the naira to the dollar depreciated from N416 in June last year to over N1,500 towards the end of February, 2024. A depreciation of over 300%. This is due to the corrupt elite exporting their loot – without that oil exporting countries should have strong currencies.
Every devaluation leads to higher rates of inflation. On the bright side it also provides more money that governments could use to increase the minimum wage or pay the doctors.
NNPC Ltd should have released its Audited Financial Statement (AFS) for 2022 in June 2023. It finally issued them in January 2024 and they showed that the company owed the government around N10 trillion in taxes. This is equivalent to half of the tax income to be collected by FIRS this year.
In June 2023, Femi Falana published the following article indicating the mass of income that Federal Governments have not even bothered to collect. This forms a massive subsidy for the corrupt elite. When governments claim they cannot afford to pay salaries or pensions as and when due they are lying. They have plenty of income and as this article shows they could have untold further amounts. The total of these scams comes to a minimum of at least N156 trillion. This is seven times the total Federal Budget for 2023 or seven years of total expenditure by the Federal Government:
All this shows that the Federal and state governments have more than enough money to pay for the NLC’s following demands:
- at least six months’ payments of N35k to all Federal workers
- payment of all salary and pension areas in states and payment of proper palliatives
- reversal of tuition fee hikes and the introduction of a maximum affordable fee level
- payment of all with-held salaries to ASUU and other education unions for 2022 strike
- no job losses from implementation of the Oronsaye report
- reversal of hikes in petrol prices.
