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The 36 state governments yesterday sent a proposal to President Goodluck Jonathan demanding for $2 billion from the foreign Excess Crude Account (ECA) to complete on-going projects and to fund coming elections, a move that will further deplete the account.
This disclosure was made by the Chairman Commissioners of Finance Forum, Barrister Timothy Odaah, from Ebonyi State.
Odaah noted that security matters and the coming elections required large amounts of money to execute and that the state governments were optimistic that President Jonathan will favourably consider the proposal.
For the fourth month in a row, the amount shared by the three tiers of government from the federation account shrunk from N603 billion shared for September to N593.337 for October 2014.
The decline in shared revenue shrunk by N10.192 billion. For October, the statutory distributable revenue shared by only the federal, states and local governments was N484.321 billion. N35.549 billion was distributed under the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P). The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) refunded N6.330 billion to the federation account while N64.137 billion was shared from Value Added Tax (VAT) proceeds.
By this, there are strong indications that many states already suffering from poor financial situations may have difficulties paying their workers’ salaries and allowances and there are strong fears that the approaching 2014 Christmas celebrations will be bleak in many states.
