Akwa Ibom State may not in reality be the highest revenue earner from the federation account as widely believed, Governor Udom Emmanuel has declared.
The Governor who spoke exclusively to Vanguard's TUNDE AJAJA said though it is relative to say Akwa Ibom is the state with the highest revenue, such assumption is arrived at by only looking at the oil revenue that is published.
"Even though I get the highest revenue from oil, there was a time that for four months, Exxon Mobil did not lift a barrel of crude oil from my state.
So, you can imagine the impact of that on my revenue. Akwa Ibom State produces about 46 per cent of the entire crude oil production in this country. During recession, we can create money but we may not have cash.
At times, what I get as the overall allocation is not even up to certain percentage of the internal revenue of some states. What I get as overall at times could be 50 per cent of VAT paid to one of the states in this country", he lamented.
In his words, "There are some months I get N5.1bn and a state could get internal generated revenue of 10.6bn. How do you reconcile these? How can you then say I get the highest revenue? What I get in total, some states get like three to six times of it.
So, don’t look at just the oil revenue, which is a product of quantity multiplied by price. And even the oil revenue we are looking at, we don’t know what is happening behind the scene.
It’s NNPC that tells us what is happening. Whoever shares meat with his mouth is the one who would know the quantity he reserved in his mouth. It’s only what he brings out that we would see", he submitted.
He admitted that Akwa Ibom is mainly a civil service state and the present economic recession affects the states Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), noting with dismay that even when taxes are raised, the ability to pay must also be there.
"So, you should look at the aggregate revenue. Some have got ecological funds, but I have never collected. Some have got special funds but I have not collected any before. Some have got some refunds but I’ve not got any", he declared.
On local government funds, the former Zenith bank staff said he never knows where the Joint Account Allocation Committee meeting holds or meets as he only knows what goes to the 31 LGA in the State when they give him the spreadsheet.
Hear him, "I’ve never known where they even hold Joint Account Allocation Committee meeting. If I know what goes to the local government, it’s when they give me the spreadsheet.
When things were exceptionally on the down side, I was subsidising local government salaries, because what they collected could not even pay salaries. In most cases, I even took up the payment of salaries of traditional chiefs that the local government is supposed to pay".
He said he never influenced the decision of the local government, but provides security for everybody. " It might interest you to know that some of us stay awake for our people to sleep well", he stated.
Source...Daniel Etokidem
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