Gross federal revenue drops by N154.5bn

The Federal Government on Tuesday said the country recorded N154.5bn decline in gross federally collected revenue in July, which stood at N630.32bn, from the N784.88bn received in June.

The Minister of State for Finance, Ambassador Bashir Yuguda, disclosed this while briefing journalists shortly after this month’s Federation Accounts Allocation Committee meeting, which was held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Finance in Abuja.

Yuguda attributed the decline in revenue to the force majeure declared by Shell and a series of shutdown of trunk lines and pipelines at various oil loading terminals.

He also said the substantial decline experienced by the Federal Inland Revenue Service in Companies’ Income Tax collection contributed to the dip in revenue for the month.

The minister, however, said that despite the drop in revenue, the committee allocated the sum of N654.58bn to the three tiers of government as statutory allocation for the month of July.

The July allocation, according to Yuguda, who is also the chairman of FAAC, was N30.31bn lower than the N684.89bn shared in the month of June.

He said N553.56bn was shared under statutory distribution; N65.46bn under Value Added Tax, while the balance of N35.54bn was allocated under the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme.

Giving a breakdown of the distribution, he said after deducting the cost of collection to the FIRS and the Nigerian Customs Service, the Federal Government received N257.32bn from statutory revenue, representing 52.68 per cent; the 36 states were to share the sum of N130.51bn or 26.72 per cent, while the sum of N100.62bn was allocated to the 774 local government councils.

Similarly, the sum of N52.87bn was allocated to the oil producing states based on the 13 per cent derivation principle.

In addition, the minister said the committee agreed to share the sum of N62.84n under Value Added Tax revenue thus: Federal Government, N9.42bn; states, N31.42bn; and local governments, N21.99bn.

Yuguda said that the committee transferred the sum of N6.2bn to the Excess Crude Account, thus bringing the balance in the account to $4bn.

He also said the sum of N35bn was transferred to the domestic Excess Crude Account for payment to oil marketers as subsidy.

Meanwhile, the committee said that it would be difficult to implement the order of the court, which directed that funding of the judiciary should be made as first line charge.

The Chairman, Forum of FAAC Commissioners, Mr. Timothy Odaah, who spoke to journalists, said the committee had directed the issue to the National Economic Council for advice.

Odaah, who is also the Commissioner of Finance, Ebonyi State, said that since this year’s budget had already been approved, it would be difficult to accommodate the demand.

He said. “We considered the fact that though the order was not being challenged, the implementation is a problem because the court order is on revenue.

“We are operating a budget and budget itself is vertical, but revenue operation is horizontal, which involves the three organs, and the three organs having lien on the Federation Account, we need to be very careful.”

On the drop in revenue, he called on the states to improve their internal revenue generating capacities to enable them to effectively cushion the impact of the drop in statutory allocations.