Ebonyi gears up IGR drive, others
By Bassey Inyang (Calabar) and Felix Uka (Abakaliki)
Cross River State Governor, Liyel Imoke
The dwindling revenue inflow from the federation account in the last couple of months is having a serious impact on the ability of the Cross River State Government to fully implement its 2013 budget of N152,418,731,311,73.
This development has forced the state government to review the budget downwards to N151,087,128,603.04, about N1.3 billion off the original budget for the year. Indeed, the downward review of the budget was sought by Governor Liyel Imoke through the "Revised Appropriation Amendment Bill" he sent to the State House of Assembly early this month.
The downward review of the 2013 budget comes at period governors of the All Progressive Congress (APC) led-states are considering going to court to challenge what they feel are uneconomical deductions from the revenue due to the states in the most inexplicable manner.
Sounding the warning that the APC would go to court over the matter, the Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State last Tuesday, after a meeting of the National Executive Committee of the party, said the states have been losing about 40 percent of their revenue in recent months due to suspicious deductions from the Federation Account.
Addressing journalists after the meeting which he hosted, Fayemi said: "Averagely, all our states lost 40 per cent of our normal earnings in the last two to three months from the FAAC and we believe this isn't defensible in any way.
"We know that the bench mark that the National Assembly agreed for 2013 budget is still very, very realistic because at no time throughout this year, and we are now in October, has oil sold for anything less than $105 per barrel. In fact, more often than not, oil sold for $110 per barrel.
"So, there is still no basis for the kind of incomplete allocations to the states in this regard and we have decided to take appropriate constitutional measures in order to tackle this flagrant abuse of the Constitution of Nigeria and the Appropriation Act, particularly of the National Assembly."
In his letter to the House dated September, 30, this year, Imoke said some unexpected developments with regards to the projected inflow of revenue has necessitated the downward review of the budget for the year.
From the content of the letter which was approved this week by the lawmakers, it is obvious that the execution of some capital projects were affected as adjustments in allocations were made for those preferred as being very essential.
In a related development, the Ebonyi State Government has adopted varied measures including perk up of its internally generated revenue in the bid to cushion the impact of the declining funds from the Federal Allocations.
The State Commissioner for Finance, Timothy Odah, who made the revelation, said that the government opened up new revenue generating windows and plucked holes that could make for possible loss of revenue.
He said that the government had adopted electronic payment of its workers, a development that has made incidents of ghost workers near impossible.
The Commissioner said that the state governor, Martin Elechi, had insisted on completing all the projects he initiated, so had to adopted strict frugality in the expenditure of the available funds.
Odah noted that the dwindling funds was a global issues of which the basic approach is adoption of measures that had made the state engage on guided expenditure that is fraud-proof, yet encouraging to the work force that is the engine room of government.
Odah added that the state government was also negotiating with some private sector operators for possible partnership in agriculture and energy as to throw up improved harness of the potentials of the area which he noted has comparative advantage in agriculture.
