NIGERIA’S 37 governors cannot have expected cheers when they declared late in 2015 that they could no longer pay a minimum wage of just $3 per day to their employees. Politicians are seldom brave enough to cut civil servants’ pay but Nigeria’s governors are desperate.
Low oil prices have slashed government revenues. Nigeria, which nowadays is comprised of 36 states and Abuja, the capital territory, operates as a federation in which most decisions over spending take place in the various state capitals. Every month the central government collects money from oil sales (which still account for more than 50% of its total revenues) and hands over just under half to the states. But that sum has plummeted since the price of crude declined. BudgIT, a Lagos-based analysis group, reckons that the states got a bit less than $7 billion between January and September 2015 compared with almost $14 billion over the same period in 2013. That led to a crisis in June when, having not paid their workers for months, 27 state governments begged President Muhammadu Buhari for a bail-out.
By December 2015 several states were again failing to pay...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1MVPE9b
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