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NEC invites Obasanjo over excess oil money
By Chesa Chesa
Correspondent, Abuja
President Olusegun
Obasanjo is expected to attend the next meeting of the National Economic
Council (NEC) to shed more light
on the management of the excess crude oil earnings.
The NEC, chaired by
Vice President Atiku Abubakar with the 36
governors as members, resolved to invite him after it met in Abuja on
Thursday.
It met at the Villa
where it also decided that the government should consider using other world
currencies in foreign transactions due to the depreciation of the United States
dollar.
The parley lasted over
three hours. at the end of it, four
Governors - Victor Attah (Akwa Ibom), Bukola Saraki (Kwara),
Ibrahim Shekarau (Kano), and Rasheed Ladoja (Oyo) - who briefed newsmen
said their decision on the excess crude fund is to enable them take a firm and
common stand on the issue.
The council also
includes the governor of the
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the finance minister as members. It advised
the government to save a higher proportion of the excess crude earnings so that
its purse would not be too adversely affected in future when prices may
depreciate.
In the heat of the
agitation by states for the revenue to be disbursed, the NEC had insisted on a
fifty-fifty percent sharing formula, in which one half is saved and the other
shared out by the Federal Allocation Committee (FAC).
Wednesday’s
meeting advised the government to clarify the status of debts incurred by
states over the years because, according to Attah, “we need to know what
we owe, when we incurred it, who incurred these debts and for what
reason”.
He said governors are
concerned that “a lot of borrowing took place before the present
governors came into office”.
The Debt Management
Office (DMO) has been requested to furnish the NEC with the details.
With regard to the
fate of the dollar, the governors urged that Abuja should consider the use of a
basket of currencies as benchmark for international trade and exchange.
They agreed on the
need for states to devise their own State Economic Empowerment Development
Strategies (SEEDS) to complement the Federal Government’s NEEDS
programme.
Plateau State Governor Joshua Dariye and his Abia State
counterpart Orji Uzor Kalu were
absent from the meeting.
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