Political Briefs
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SENATOR Udoma Udo Udoma, minister of budget and national planning, has dismissed speculations that the federal owes workers salaries at the federal level. He said “We have paid all salaries. The Federal government has always been paying its salaries, and there is no risk whatsoever that there is going to be a situation where it will not pay salaries.
“Let me also say that we are about to have FAAC this month, There is actually an increase in the amount that is going to be available in FAAC. I will let the minister of finance talk about the exact amount. There is an increase because of FIRS. Our tax collection is going up.
“When I appeared before the senate last week, I did inform Nigerians that indeed we are beginning to move up, our revenue situation is actually improving on the month already. Our tax collection is already improving, there is no doubt that we are actually going through a difficult time but things are improving.”
Udoma also gave a ray of hope on the current Nigeria’s economic quagmire, saying that there were strong indications that the economy would rebound from later this year to early next year. He acknowledged that 2016 had been bad on the economy, majorly attributing the situation to the restiveness in the Niger Delta. The minister said that the attacks by the militants which had had negative impact on oil production were not anticipated.
He, however, said the federal government was working assiduously to diversify the economy by developing other sectors such as agriculture and solid minerals. “Recession is basically when you have two quarters of negative growth. We had a first quarter of negative growth and we are still waiting to get all the figures for the second quarter which has just ended in June.
“The National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, will be giving us all the figures but if as we suspect the second quarter is also negative, then of course technically you could say that we are in recession if those figures turn out to be so. But even if we are not, the situation in the economy right now is one that of course we are addressing.
“Some of it was expected some of it was not. We did expect the low oil price but we did not to expect the level of disruption that we got in the Niger Delta, such that oil production went down and we are not likely to achieve the 2.2 million barrel per day because it went down to 1.2 million barrel per day, a little over about 1.3 million barrel per day.
“So you can imagine the impact but some measures are being taken to address those issues. We expect that by the third quarter we will start to pick up and we expect to finish the year in positive territory. That is what we are expecting. We expect to be marginally positive by the end of this year. But by next year, we will now start to pick up and we will have much more growth next year.
“We are focusing on agriculture, solid mineral and manufacturing. So, basically, we see what we are going through as an opportunity in some ways to finally move away from total dependence on the single commodity crude oil. “We believe that Nigerians have the capacity to turn this thing around. It is the private sector that is going to do it. Our role as a government is to provide the enabling environment. For that to happen we are confident that that will happen,” he said.
— Aug 1, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT
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