'Financial intelligence will bail govt., individuals out of poverty'

• Published date: 16 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

The 2023 Budget is N21.83 trillion with a deficit financing of N10.7trillion. What is your take on this?

Once your expenditure is greater than your income, your upkeep will become your downfall. Every time you spend more than you earn, you are in trouble. There is nothing wrong in borrowing, but you don't borrow for consumption. You borrow for production. Right now, our debt servicing is even more than our income and we are borrowing to pay debt and it's a bottomless pit. I am hopeful that as we move into the election, more serious-minded and patriotic people would be at the helm of affairs and will be able to help us come out of the wilderness that we have plunged ourselves into as a nation. So, the indices are not good at all. The question to ask our economic planners is what have they put in place to balance up the deficit? Is there going to be power generation because without industrialisation, there cannot be productivity and without productivity, there cannot be income. Are you going to get us more power so that small businesses can thrive? Are you going to block the leakages within the system; what about the refineries; are they going to work? One man is about to complete the construction of a refinery in three years and a whole nation has not been able to build one refinery in 23 years.

How can the country finance the budget given the constraint facing her?

It is all about being financially intelligent. There are only two ways that you can make more money available to you - increase your income and reduce your expenditure. There are various ways that Nigeria can increase her income and reduce her expenditure. One, inflated contracts - many of the contracts that we are borrowing money to execute are inflated. If we go into audit of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDCC), Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA), NNPC and the parastatals, you will be shocked. It is only in Nigeria that we build an airport at more than 300 per cent of the cost of building it in another country. Two, there are lots of unreported and unremitted revenue from the ministries, agencies and parastatals; you remember what happened to JAMB, which was said to be unprofitable and, then, somebody came and they started making billions of naira. When government started the Treasury Single Account (TSA) regime, one parastatal was having 42 accounts and some of those accounts were signed by individuals. Number three is extortion. There is a high level of extortion going on in different...