it seems as if the battle the federal government is fighting is on multiple fronts and yesterday, for the second time in five months, the monthly meeting of the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee, FAAC, was aborted as its Chairman, the Minister of State for Finance, Dr Yerima Ngama, failed to convince the State Commissioners of Finance on an acceptable terms for which the May, 2013 allocations should be based.
The development further confirmed that the lingering face-off between the federal and state governments over federally collectable revenues and their distributions, particularly the controversial issue of the Excess Crude Accounts, ECA, may have worsened.
With the development, most states with poor Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, capacity may be in for very hard times in terms of fulfilling their funding obligations, especially on personnel and overhead expenditures this month and possibly the next.
Speaking to the media at the end of the over four hours bickering over the May 2013 distributions, three and half of which were earlier spent at the Finance Ministry head-quarters, the Chairman of State Finance Commissioners Forum, Timothy Odaah, said the briefing was just “to tell the world the reason for boycotting this month’s FAAC session.”
Specifically, he listed the “the non-implementation of the decisions and resolutions taken in most FAAC plenary sessions, especially the May 2013 resolutions, which still remains inconclusive based on the fact that the arrears of February has not been paid.