Nigerians misunderstand the NGF, says Yari

GOVERNOR Abdulkarim Abubakar Yari of Zamfara State is the Chairman of the “unified” Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF), a body that was split along partisan lines in the twilight of the Jonathan administration. He told a group of reporters in Abuja, including Mohammed Abubakar of our Abuja Bureau, how he hopes to turn the fortunes of the forum around. Excerpts:

On impressions that NGF is used to blackmail the President
How do you blackmail a sitting President? When you say blackmail it means you are bringing a thing that is not in place to him to intimidate him with it. I think that is what blackmail is. We don’t intimidate him. How do you intimidate your President? We don’t blackmail the President because the forum is basically about the economy, good governance, relationship amongst the governors and peer review mechanism within us to learn from each other. So, it is not the way people look at it. They feel we are putting a lot of pressure on the President, but sometimes, it is not like that. There was a time that Governor Rotimi Amaechi made a statement that the forum is a pressure group and he said it because as at that time, we had been saying to the government that they should talk to the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to be doing the right thing because we were having different figures, our figures did not tally with what they had, we told the government to talk to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to do the right thing but I think that was the genesis of the whole issues we had. So, sometimes, things are not the way we perceive them, even the Excess Crude Account (ECA) they are talking about, how much is our own in it?

The Federal Government gets larger share because they have 52 percent and we (states) have just 28 percent and then about 21 percent goes to the local governments. So how much is our own in the fund? In those days, the reason why we complained when there was availability of those funds is because the Federal Government has, on so many occasions, dipped hands into the national treasury without giving back to the Consolidated Revenue Account (CRA). NNPC man would not give you figure until he discusses with the President. He will ask the President what he should present. The Federal Inland Revenue Services (FIRS) too, the Comptroller-General of Customs the same thing, even the National Communication Commission, (NCC) the same thing, any agency you can think of, Federal Government can quickly dip its hands even before putting it into the CRA and we have no any other revenue than what is presented to us. So, sometimes, we find it difficult to survive in terms of meeting our recurrent spending talk less of going for infrastructural development. Therefore, in that line, we do request, we don’t beg because it is our own. Sometimes the President grants our request and sometimes, he does not, so we don’t intimidate anybody.

Making the NGF a truly rallying point
I think this question is fundamental to NGF because for the first time, it experienced division in 2013 and as you know, this forum has been in existence since 1999 and it has had five or six chairmen. From Senator Abdullahi Adamu formerly of Nasarawa to Obong Victor Attah former governor of Akwa Ibom to Lucky Igbinedion of Edo, down to Bukola Saraki of Kwara and then Amaechi of Rivers, all of them in different capacity, they have served as chairmen and the forum has been supportive to the government and Nigeria, not only the forum itself, because one thing about the forum that people didn’t understand is that it is not about the governors discussing excess crude alone, that is the major thing that people know about our meetings but it is not only about that. It is about the general economy of the nation. A platform of the National Economic Council, (NEC) where the governors are members, in fact, we are the owners, because the Vice President is the Chairman from the side of the Presidency and by extension Minister of Finance and any other person will be in attendance but the 36 governors are members.

So from the side of Federal Government, there are three functionaries and from the side of states, we are 36 except those that we invite to come and contribute or make presentation for the purpose of how the Nigeria economy will move forward. So, if you look at that platform where your own life is going to be discussed, it is not a small platform where you will just handle things anyhow, you have to make plans and see what you are going to discuss during the meeting, so, we discuss on the agenda set up by the secretariat and by extension office of the Vice President. We discuss, we go through it and we also have experts that we hire who are consultants from agriculture, mining and other sectors of the economy and they advise us on what is going to be discussed.

We discuss how the main meeting will look like midnight of the national economic council and then we give a proper presentation and then they will know that the governors actually came in with a good idea. So, in 2013 when we started having problems, we know that the issue of division was in the interest of the Federal Government then.

The Constitution states it clearly that all money should go into consolidated revenue account and then shared within the three tiers of government and this has brought turmoil between the NGF and the Federal Government and I think also between who was the
Chairman then and the President. So, up to the time that we had to vote and the vote of 19 was not seen as higher than 16. It was not accepted by the then President, and that was what brought the division. But today, to be the Chairman, and by the support of my colleagues, we are now having one forum and it is a rallying point for all governors.

Inability of state governments to meet financial obligations
Even the Federal Government in the last one or two years have been borrowing to pay salaries, (Ngozi) Okonjo-Iweala mentioned it times without number that they have to borrow to pay salaries and they augment later as part of their own share of the federation account. So, government at the centre has the capacity to do a lot of borrowing but at the state, we are tight because we don’t have the sovereign borrowing, no financial institution will give you promos at borrowing in your tenure, that is the trouble for four years but the Federal Government can borrow for 20 years to either pay salary or to do development but it is compulsory and there is nothing they can do about it, they have to borrow to make up. The only thing that can save us out is to diversify the economy. We have so many ways like agriculture, mining and infrastructural development.

Since we started oil export, government did not do much to develop other sectors of the economy. Presently, all our infrastructural facilities are in decay. If you look at India and China, they are earning much from the rail transportation alone. So, if we had developed that sector perfectly, today, it would have given so many supports.

So, you can understand that if those kinds of infrastructures were developed in the past, the situation will not be what it is today. We need to diversify and that is the only way we can survive. The price of oil is no longer going attain the 120 mark in the next two years, it may be around 70/85 but if we diversify the economy, definitely we will get something better. But for now and where we are, we only get a temporary solution where we pay salary arrears and then be looking out to pay another one. The solution is temporary, but we are hoping that looking inwards and also trying to block leakages in oil producing area, maybe we will be able to get a better way out but there is no better way than to diversify the economy from oil to mining, agriculture, infrastructure development. That will bring more revenue to the federation and the states.