The former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria
and Emir of Kano, Mallam Muhammad Sanusi, on
Thursday urged President Muhammadu Buhari to
plug revenue leakages in the country if he must make
headway in its anti-corruption crusade.

Sanusi, who maintained that the Nigeria National
Petroleum Corporation had been a drain pipe to the
Nigerian economy for a long time, spoke in Lagos at
‘the Federal Government Budget Symposium’
organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants
of Nigeria.

The emir was the royal father of the day at the event
titled “Come Nigeria – The nation’s fiscal challenges
and way forward for the new administration.’

He said, “No matter how good your budget is, if you
cannot do simple things like track your oil revenue,
you cannot meet the basic government’s obligations
to the citizens”
“Before the government goes borrowing, they need
to find out why revenue is so low, given that our GDP
is supposed to be high”. he said.

He also faulted the NNPC’s swap of crude oil, saying
that the country had always been on the losing side
in the deal.

“Nobody does swaps unless country like Iran when it
is under economic sanctions and can’t sell its oil at
the international market or may be your crude is of
very low quality,” he said.

The emir added that country was not actually
subsidising the price of petroleum products, it was
only hedging it, adding that the oil subsidy was
structured in a way that could give a lot of room for
manipulation.

“Anybody who knows economics knows what subsidy
and hedging are. We don’t have subsidy, we have
hedge,” he added.
According him, there was no way the country could
win with this hedging.

He wondered how the country’s Gross Domestic
Product was said to have gone up after the rebasing
of the country when production did not in any way
increase.
Earlier, the President, ICAN, Samuel Deru, had stated
that the ratio of recurrent to capital expenditure at
70:30 was scandalously disproportional.

“As a professional body, we strongly believe that the
nation’s economy needs surgical and drastic reforms
beyond cosmetic privatization of government
companies. And this should be begin with plugging of
all revenue leakages, revisiting and redefining of our
priorities as a nation, slashing of cost of governance
(e.g. by reducing Ministries, Departments and
Agencies), investing more in capital goods, enforcing
fiscal discipline and above all, leveraging our huge
natural and human resource endowments to
reposition the nation on the path to sustained growth
and development,” he said.