The moves to support an Igbo person to become the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has intensifies as more details of the benefit it will bring has been highlighted.
The call for an Igbo President has been on for a long time now with mixed opinion trailing that issue as people express their various attitudes towards it.
However, the issue attracted another serious consideration when a former Governor of the old Anambra State, Jim Nwobodo said that there will be a difference in the country when an Igbo man becomes the President.
According to The Punch, Nwobodo said this on Sunday while speaking during his 79th birthday in Enugu. He urged people from the South-East to be united, adding that the zone would produce Nigeria’s President without fighting.
“If an Igbo man becomes the President, there will be a difference,” he said.
The former governor also charged the judiciary to continue to rise in defence of the country. He said the judiciary was the only institution that was holding the country together.
In his speech, the President-General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief Nnia Nwodo, extolled Nwobodo’s leadership qualities, describing him as an icon. He likened his leadership style to that of the state governor, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi whom he said did not discriminate among political parties.
“Ugwuanyi has no boundary. We have never had such love that exists in Enugu State today,” he said.
It will be recalled that Igbos who are members of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, have consistently appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to help consider the Igbos in the bid to get his successor after at the end of his second term in 2023.
They also call on the APC to zone the Presidency to the South East which will help to make that push for Igbo President possible. Will Buhari and the APC do anything about the demand? No one knows for now until when the time comes.
In another development, indication has emerged on the difficulty being faced by some states in Nigeria. This came to the fore as data made available by the Nigeria Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has shown that 28 states would be unable to fund their 2019 budgets from revenue realised in 2018 and 2017.
The information, which was made available in the NEITI quarterly review. The eight states that would be able to fund their 2017 and 2018 revenue are Enugu, Kaduna, Delta, Yobe, Lagos, Kano, Nasarawa and Rivers. According to the data, only Yobe can fund its 2019 budget from the disbursements it received from the federation accounts allocations committee (FAAC).
A drop in oil prices also affected FAAC disbursements as the three tiers of government were unable to share N2 trillion in the first quarter of 2019 as was the trend since the second quarter of 2018.
“Oil prices experienced a downward spiral from November 2018. Oil prices were above $80 per barrel in October 2018 but by December 2018 they had dropped to $57 per barrel. Average oil price for the first quarter of 2019 was $63.17 per barrel. The average oil price for the year 2018 was $71.06 per barrel. Thus, oil prices have been considerably lower in the first three months of 2019 than they were in 2018,” NEITI said in its review.
NEITI described the budgets of states as being “largely too optimistic” adding that there are wide disparities in the net FAAC disbursements to states. “This review showed that budgets for states are largely too optimistic. There is no state whose net FAAC disbursements in either 2017 or 2018 can adequately finance their budgets for 2019,” it said.
“This highlights the critical gap in the ability of FAAC disbursements to finance state budgets and brings into focus the importance of internally generated revenue (IGR). It also shows the inevitability of borrowing by states.”
More calls have been made for state governments to devise means of creatively increasing their Internally Generated Revenues (IGRs) to meet some of their financial obligations.
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