Economy: Okonjo-Iweala toying with figures —Oshiomhole

ISESELE EZEKIEL, Benin

Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has accused the former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, of toying with figures and being economical with the truth on the state of the economy inherited by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Oshiomhole, who said the Federal Government is broke, said the Federal Government would have been in a worse shape than states if it had not resorted to borrowing to pay wages, adding that the economy under Okonjo-Iweala as finance minister and coordinating minister of the economy was so mismanaged that waivers were granted to various organizations running into several hundreds of millions of naira.

Speaking during an interview on a television network yesterday, the governor said, “With all due respect to the former Minister Okonjo-Iweala, she knows how to play around with statistics. I have made the point, she keeps opening part of the pages and not the entire book. The logic of transparency is that every minister must publish in full what is accruing to the federation account month to month and what is distributed to them. What she has been publishing is that this is what went to the Federal Government, this is what went to the state government and this is what goes to the local government.

“What she never published simultaneously is what accrued during the period out of which this was distributed. So we can now know what was collected to what was distributed so we can know what is left in the excess crude account. You can see her changing the goal post.

“On the authority to spend, Okonjo-Iweala was a member of the National Economic Council, I was a member and I am on record of asking her, don’t give us verbal reports on matters of federation account, give us written report and the power to spend is not vested on commissioners.

“Look at the constitution and tell me which section gives the commissioner of finance the power, all of them, they are unknown to ballot, they are not elected but the membership of NEC is clear, governors chaired by the vice president representing the president, the CBN and other relevant ministries. How will she avoid this level of accountability?

“The decision to take money from the excess crude account, that power is vested in the National Economic Council. The NEC is an institution created in the constitution. What she is referring to is her own administrative arrangement. The $2 billion is her last sum because in her last report, she said we had $4.1 billion, she said so orally but it was captured in the minutes only for her to come around again at the last minute to say “X” figure is left. We asked her, what did you pay for?”

On states which owe salary arrears to their workers, Oshiomhole said: “Every employer of labour has an obligation, a contractual obligation to pay those who work. The Bible says a labourer is entitled to his wages.

“Once you have laboured, it has to be paid for and you don’t pay wages because you are rich and you are able to afford it, you pay wages because the people have worked for it. It is not a gift from a kind-hearted employer, it is an obligation, it is a consequence for work.

“I think what has happened is that at the peak of the oil boom, prices were high, people made projections about their expected expenditure and budget on the basis of those numbers, along the line, there was a sharp drop and this sharp drop that people talk about is not just about a drop in terms of price of crude oil because prices have dropped below this level before.

“What is new is the level of so-called crude oil theft. A situation in which certain persons, powerful in the system, pretend not to know what was going on and simply excuse the huge lapses in terms of crude oil theft. So you have a double squeeze of drop in price and escalation in the volume of alleged theft of crude. The combined effect of these is that the total inflow into the federation account dropped sharply.

“This is also compounded by the fact that the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the two of them working together simply refused to transfer to the federation account a lot of the money that ought to have accrued. For example, over the past 4 to 5 years, the NLNG had every year made huge payment between $1.5 and $2 billion which ought to go to the federation account. This money was never transferred to the federation account; it was unilaterally expended by the Federal Government.

“We were not even informed of the fact that these money were paid and each time we ask the then Hon. Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy what was happening with the proceeds from the NLNG, no explanation was ever offered whether in black and white or in oral and there are several other federal agencies that made huge sums of money which were illegally and unilaterally spent by the Federal Government, without being allowed to flow into the federation account.

“So when you draw up a budget on the basis of anticipated revenue and there is such a sharp drop in revenue arising from diversion and there is also drop in price, obviously something will have to give in.”