The hopes of Nigerian university students hoping for an early end to the current Academic Staff Union of Universities (Strike) strike going on right now have been put to a halt after the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iwela on Tuesday insisted that the Federal Government has no resources to meet the demands of the union. read more after the cut...
Speaking in Minna at the annual National Council on Finance and Economic Development (NACOFED), with the theme: “Restructuring Nigeria’s Finances”, Okonjo-Iwela said that the striking university lecturers were asking for N92 billion in extra allowances which the government could not afford.
According to her, “At present ASUU wants the government to pay N92bn in extra allowances when resources are not there and when we are working to integrate past increases in pensions. We need to make choices in this country as we are getting to the stage where recurrent expenditures take the bulk of our resources and people get paid but can do no work.”
The Minister said, if the demands of the university lecturers are met and “we continue to pay them salaries and allowances we will not be able to provide infrastructure in the universities”.
The minister argued that when she assumed office “the share of recurrent expenditure in our total budgets had increased astronomically. In fact recurrent expenditures accounted for about 77.2 per cent of the federal budget and we are now working to re-balance this ratio”.
Maintaining that the country is still suffering from the effect of the 2010 increase in salary, the minister asked “if we want to get to a stage in this country that all the money we earn is used to pay salaries and allowances?”
Okonjo-Iweala lamented that Nigeria’s over dependence on oil had resulted in deterioration of the nation’s non oil tax, noting that in 1970 non oil taxes accounted for 74 per cent of the country’s revenues but by 2012 it had declined to only 30% of federal government revenues.
“Many states and local governments are also dependent on monthly revenue allocation from the central government. On average only 11 percent of sub-national revenue was obtained from internally generated sources,” she said.
She concluded by saying Nigeria should focus on the non oil sector of the economy especially agriculture especially now that many countries have discovered and are now refining oil
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