Chinwe Ochu
15 August 2008
Abuja — Nigeria's domestic excess crude account as at June 2008 stood at N404.92 billion, while the foreign account as at the month under review was $15.3billion, the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) has said.
Speaking at a brainstorming session on the New Approach to Crude Oil Benchmarking, Chairman of RMAFC, Mr. Hamman Tukur, said the session was initiated to introduce new concept of benchmarking that would exclusively translate crude oil revenues into infrastructural development.
He said the event was also meant to dedicate excess crude oil revenues, not included in the annual budget, to funding critical sectors of the economy.
"The problem with this old system is that we do not normally go back to the National Assembly and account for the remaining benchmark. For example, as at June 2008, the excess foreign account stands at $15.3 billion, while 445,000 barrels of crude oil was lifted and refined locally everyday, which amounts to N405 billion.
"There has to be an account for the difference between $15.3 billion and the amount of the sale of the barrels for June," he said.
Tukur said the practices of oil benchmarking over the years had led the country into creating the clause "excess revenue account" in the budgetary allocation, which he said was illegal.
"In recent years, the creation of the Excess Revenue Account as one of the nation's fiscal policy instrument of managing revenue inflow into the Federation Account has been seen at the commission as well as many others as an aberration of the constitution particularly Section 162 of the 1999 Constitution. All these excesses are not known to the law," he said.
According to him, the excess crude money was not incorporated into budgetary allocation because the nation's policymakers emphasised that Nigeria did not yet possess the "absorption capacity" to spend the money and maintained that the use of the money would cause inflation.
"How can they say that despite the infrastructural and developmental decay Nigeria is experiencing? The economic policymakers do not seem to tackle the major issues in Nigeria.
"We have iron ore, coal and other minerals; still we cannot access them because of the economic theories of these intellectual minds and leading public analysts," he said.
He observed that the lacuna in Nigeria was the absence of political will and discipline in the system, adding that "we should change our approach to budgeting for a change".
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