Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun revealed in Lagos yesterday that the N165bn paid to federal civil servants monthly salaries was very high and could no longer be sustained by government.
Speaking at a forum organised by Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, NPAN, Adeosun, and graced by her counterparts in the persons of the Ministries of Agriculture, Audu Ogbe, Environment, Aminat Mohammed and Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed in their addresses were unanimous in saying that for the country to develop sustainably, government has to cut down on wasteful spending and over dependent on importation.
Adeosun, said the N165bn being paid to federal civil servants monthly represented 40 per cent of the total spending of government. She said the figure was over bloated and government was pursuing aggressive measures to detect and prosecute ghost workers and other saboteurs in the system.
“We spend N165bn every month on salaries and when I came in, there was no checking. “Now, we have created a unit assigned with the sole responsibility of checking the salaries and catching those behind the over bloated salaries,” she said. Adeosun said the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, introduced by the previous administration were faulty and sabotaged by the element benefitting from the salary fraud. She said many Federal Government establishments, including the police were yet to be captured in the system. According to her, it is shocking that Nigerian Railway Corporation, NRC, which was not fully functioning still had 10,000 workers in its payroll serviced by government. The minister assured that government would correct the anomalies in the payroll system and weed out all ghost workers in the service. She said the fiscal focus of the administration was to ensure an economic growth that would be measured on job creation and productive sectors. “The economy is not measured by how many private jets we have but how many jobs we create “People must be productive for the economy to grow.
“We have been a consumer economy, but we want to be productive and stop buying everything from abroad. “We have been borrowing to pay salaries for years and that has to stop because it is not sustainable. “Last year, we spent N64bn on travelling and only N90bn on roads. Travelling does not grow the economy and this must also stop,” she said. The minister said the compound GDP of the country had been growing negatively in the last 10 years and the administration was working to correct the trend. “What we are saying is that the money we have been spending in the last ten years or so have not been effective in growing our economy. We have been borrowing, our income has been high and the rate of growth has been quite low.
“Only 10 per cent of what we spent last year was on capital expenditure. 90 per cent was on recurrent. No economy has ever grown by doing that. What is your capital? Your power, your roads, your rails, your housing. Only 10 per cent of what we spent goes to those things. Others go to consumables. “We became too dependent on oil and we have always been told that if oil price crashes, we would have problems. The problems we have today were not created today. We have actually been heading in this direction for some years,” Adeosun said. She assured that the administration would be the most discipline government the country has ever had in terms of fiscal accountability and responsibility. According to the minister, the change that people voted for, was for the economy to grow sustainably. Ogbeh, in his own contribution said the country spends over $22bn importing food annually. The minister said government would reposition the agricultural sector to become the mainstay of the economy. According to him, Nigeria used to be great in the area of food production but with the discovery of oil, government and people’s attention shifted from agriculture to oil.
He said: “Before, we used to be major exporters of palm oil, cocoa, soya beans, groundnut etc. But today, we are one of the biggest importers of food in the world. The total bill on food importation annually, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, is $22bn. “What are we importing? We are importing rice, wheat, milk, sugar, fish, industrial starch, juice concentrates, tomatoes paste, honey, vegetable oil etc daily. “Few days ago, the CBN governor told me that the total demand for dollars on a daily basis is $3.5bn. “This reckless policy on importation has brought Nigeria down to near zero. We got here because oil and gas made it too easy to import and we did not have strong enough government to say we will only import values not foods. “We will import medical equipment, we will import books, but we would not import food.
No one has had the courage to say that in the past. “The ministry will give policy direction and coordination to make farming attractive and for people to practice it as business. “Government will put policy in place to recover the $22bn, which is floating out of the country’s resources to sustain farms in other countries back to our villages. “Government will also ensure that banks review the two digits interest rate on loan to farmers and other productive sector. “The change promised may appear to be slow, but it is actually taking place. In this year, we have harvested million tons of rice.” Ogbe said the country has been the victim of economic warfare in the last 40 years. According to him, the time has come for Nigerians to stand up and say no to foreign interest that continue to bully the nation to submission and taken her hostage.
He said: “The world is at war everyday of the week. It is not a physical war that can be measured by the number of bombs and missiles that has been dropped. “Economic warfare is far more ruthless; far more effective and far more destructive than any form of war you can think of and we have been victims at least in the last 40 years. “We have even been told don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t grow rice, don’t grow wheat, if you grow it, it is a hostile act. Why don’t you keep buying from us? And what is the rice bill now; $5m par day, wheat, about $6m per day.”
Environment Minister, Mohammed said government would complete the clean-up of the Ogoni land in the next one year and ensure the degraded land was revived for productive purposes. She said the Great Green Wall project of planting trees to control desert encroachment would also be given priority by the administration.