The Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) unexpectedly shifted its November meeting from yesterday to today following the unavailability of a document on revenue generated by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Stakeholders could not receive the component statement (a very important FAAC document) from the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
This is the first time FAAC is taking place on a Saturday.
A delegate to the meeting said: “NNPC is the major cause of all this.It brought no money just like it did last month and the governors insisted it must bring in money before it later brought out N30 billion from Excess Crude Account (ECA) for the last FAAC to hold.
“Today,the CBN and the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) said there was no component statement available from NNPC.
“They have not received the component statement from the NNPC indicating that NNPC has not paid money into the Federation Account. Without that money, we have to wait till tomorrow (today) for FAAC meeting to take place.
“When the component statement is sent from NNPC it will take about six hours for the stakeholders can go through it.
“The component statement is with the AGF and it will take about six hours before the FAAC meeting can be scheduled.”
The October FAAC meeting suffered the same fate, prompting delegates to call for the suspension of the meeting until matters were reconciled.
At that meeting, it was agreed that states would be fully involved in tracking and collating the figures presented by the NNPC to the FAAC.
Addressing journalists at the end of the October FAAC meeting in Abuja which held several weeks late Mr. Mahmoud Yunusa, Chairman of commissioners forum said they “discovered discrepancies in the October 2017 figures of the FAAC Papers submitted by NNPC and demanded genuine figures. Going forward, we will engage a consultant to work with NNPC to collate figures and report back to states on the true figures.”
Based on the demands of the state governments for proper figures to be disclosed by the NNPC, Mahmoud Yunusa said “there was a slight inflow in the amount that accrued for sharing at the end of the day.”
The states, he said, decided to take what was handed out to them so that they “can go manage to go home with what we got today so that we can pay salaries.”