Federation Account over overburdened — RMAFC

The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission says the Federation Account is over overburdened because of the demands made on the account by the three tiers of government.

RMAFC Chairman Elias Mbam stated this while receiving an Annual States Viability Index from the Editor-in-Chief of the Economic Confidential, Yushau Shuaib in his office in Abuja.

• NNPC, FIRS, DPR, others remitted N28.58tr to Federation Account in 5 years – NEITI
• We remitted N1.26tr to Federation Account in 2018 – NNPC

To reduce the stress on the Federation Account, Mbam called on state governments to develop strategies to boost their internal revenues.

He said: “the annual ASVI report apart from providing a good source of information to the general public also has been identified as a source of information that would drive RMAFC on its mandate to encourage states of the federation to improve their Internally Generated Revenue.”

“The report is factual and authoritative should be useful, especially in guiding states whose revenues keep dwindling so that they can improve.”

Earlier, Shuaib said the ASVI report assessed and ranked states by their annual IGR in comparison to their receipts from the Federation Account allocation.

He said the report showed that “without the monthly disbursement from the Federation Account, many states cannot survive as the indices showed that seven states are insolvent due to very poor IGR that were far below 10% of their receipts from the Federation Account”.

Shuaib said apart from Lagos and Ogun States that ranked high in the revenue generation in 2019, more states had recorded impressive and encouraging IGR in 2019 compared to 2018.

“The report shows that only Rivers, Kaduna, Enugu, Kwara and Zamfara States did well with regards to impressive revenue generation in 2019 compared to their IGR in the previous year 2018 by improving more than 10%.

“The states with the worst IGR performance in 2019 thus rendering them insolvent according to the report are Katsina, Kebbi, Borno, Bayelsa and Taraba States “with extremely poor IGR”.