The Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) is scheduled to distribute N1.959 trillion, which was generated as revenue in June 2023, among the Federal, State, and Local Governments on Thursday.
On that day, both the technical and plenary meetings of the FAAC will convene to officially endorse the allocation amounts for the federal government, state governments, and local governments.
According to reports, “statutory collections make up N1.7 trillion of the federally collected revenues, followed by N293 billion from Value Added Tax (VAT) and N12 billion from electronic money transfer charges.
Senior Special Assistant Media and Publicity to the President, Temitope Ajayi while reacting to the development said, “that FAAC will share almost N2trillion in July, the first time in history, as revenue for the three tiers of government, is an immediate and major benefit of fuel subsidy removal.
“This money that would have been frittered away, in a month, via fuel subsidy will now go into the coffers of government to improve the living conditions of the people. What this means is that there will now be more money available for real development.
He noted that “States and Local Governments will have enough money to pay salaries of workers and pensioners.
“Government at all levels will become more solvent, be in a stronger financial position to easily pay new minimum wage, and fund development in critical sectors, especially in education, healthcare, and public transportation.
Going forward, Nigerians he said should “begin to focus attention on our states and local governments to demand more accountability and transparency in the use of public funds. The real governance impact should be at the State and local levels.”
Addressing the issue, Professor Uche Uwaleke of Nasarawa State University referred to the amount set to be distributed tomorrow as a “significant rise in FAAC Allocation.”
Nevertheless, he emphasized the crucial need for proper accountability and transparency in the utilization of these funds, it is necessary to “ascertain from the FAAC Allocation the proportion of the increase in funds resulting from the naira devaluation; ring-fence the funds by creating a special account for them and obtain approval from the National/State Assemblies as the case may be to apply them to special projects in education, health, and infrastructure provision.
Such funds he added “should not be used to implement an increase in minimum wage or applied to recurrent expenditure.
“All tiers of government should endeavor to increase workers’ salaries through reducing wastes and cost of governance as well as plugging loopholes in revenue collection leveraging technology”.
