Nigeria: A nation living, running on 2% national revenue

 

If as Ribadu said the Tinubu administration inherited a bankrupt country from the Buhari Administration and if as Edun said we as at today, we are spending a whopping 98 per cent of all our revenue to service debts…

Then it means the only free revenue available to the Nigerian Government for funding the national budget is 2 per cent of all accruable revenue and it’s from this 2 per cent that we are buying Land Cruiser SUVs for each of the Members of the National Assembly in their hundreds

It’s from the 2 per cent that we will be paying millions of naira every month to the Members of the National Assembly as salaries and allowances

It’s from the 2 per cent that we will buy the fleet of vehicles for the president, the presidency and the Ministers

It’s from the 2 per cent that we will pay the civil servants and the ever growing community of SAs, SSAs, PAs and their SSAs, SAs and PAs and their SUVs and fleet of vehicles

It’s from the 2 per cent that we will find capital projects and innumerable number of government programmes

The 2 per cent narrative is an endless trajectory in our national economy

It’s not rocket science to know that even our phone batteries running on 2 per cent battery charge will run flat in just a matter of minutes and the phone will switch itself off, unless it’s immediately connected to a charger

Nigeria is running on 2 per cent national revenue. It’s an economic disaster. It’s an economic time bomb ready to explode in our faces and yet the government is spending recklessly as if there is no tomorrow

Edun told the National Assembly yesterday that we must stop further debts to save the economy

But, who is sending request for approval of the debts to National Assembly almost on daily basis?

And if we don’t take further loans, how can we fund the multi trillion Naira budget deficits

How can we sustain the lavish expenditure for the Executive and the Legislature, who have made a claim of entitlement mentality to the only 2 per cent revenue available for all of us?

I am not an economist but as a victim of Economics, I don’t need a guru in Economics to tell me that the economy of Nigeria will soon be brought to it’s knees and eventually crash on the canvass, unless we return to the table to reorder our national priorities and collapse the outrageous cost of governance

We must use the sledge hammer and the slasher simultaneously to cut down the stem, branches and leaves of the tree of government expenditure

And as if this is not enough trouble for the nation, we breed unbridled corruption in all facets of our official lives and corruption alone, is the worst threat to the 2 per cent live wire on which Nigeria is surviving as a nation

Yusuf Shehu Usman, mni

Abuja