• As Finance commissioners boycott FAAC meeting over discrepancies in federation account

The Federal Government has announced that it has concluded plans to re-introduce tolls on major highways across the country.

The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), while appearing before the Senate Committee on Federal Roads Maintenance Agency on Thursday, said 38 points had been identified in the first phase of the re-introduction.

“Clearly, tolling is coming,” the minister told the lawmakers.

While saying that the new toll gates would be situated at the old spots, Fashola stated that tolls would be collected after the roads had been made motorable.

He said, “We are not going to ask road users to pay toll on a road that is not good. While the construction (of gates) is going on, we are working on the design. We want to standardise the design so that when we ask people to come and bid for the construction, we can control what they are going to construct. They are going to construct with the materials we have prescribed.

“We can also control the price so that nobody is bidding with disparage prices; there will be the floor and the ceiling. Your price will vary according to how many plazas you build and not because you claim to have used ‘foreign’ materials.

“The last part we are working on is the software that drives the management, audit and payment of toll. We want to use the development that has taken place between when the old toll plazas were dismantled and now. There were no GSM and payment platforms as of that time as we have cell phones and cards now. We want to make it very easy for people to go to kiosks and buy toll cards and pay tolls.

“It will also be easy to audit from any of our offices. We will be able to see what is going on, how many people passed, how many vehicles, and we can settle payments to operators in a very transparent and accountable way.”

Members of the committee decried that only N800m had been released to FERMA out of the N25bn voted to the agency in the 2017 budget.

They disclosed that there was a plan to move a motion next week to ask the government to release more funds for road maintenance as the Yuletide season was approaching.

Fashola however said releases to FERMA were suspended as the agency did not have a board for some time.

In the meantime, the 36 states in Nigeria on Thursday boycotted the monthly Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) meeting due to discrepancies in figures presented by the Federal Government.

The Chairman, Forum of Finance Commissioners in Nigeria, Mr Mahmoud Yunusa, said the forum came to the decision after consultation with their state governors.

According to him, the governors have given the commissioners directive to postpone the meeting pending the reconciliation of all accounts.

“The meeting has been postponed until we reconcile the figures in the accounts.

“I sincerely apologise for keeping everyone, but this is the position of our principals through the Chairman, Governor’s Forum, even though the matter was discussed at length during NEC when all the Governors were present.

“So we should all take our leave and wait for the next date which will be announced later,” he said.

Yunusa said that the finance commissioners as well as the state Accountants-General would meet next week to decide when to reconvene the meeting.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) later approached the Chairman, who is also the Adamawa state Commissioner for Finance.

He refused to expatiate on the nature of the discrepancies.

However, another Commissioner, on condition of anonymity, told NAN that the discrepancies came from the figures presented by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

The latest development is coming four months after the NNPC completed the refund of N450 billion to the federation account, to be shared to federal, states and local councils.

The NNPC had for 67 consecutive months, paid an additional N6.33 billion into the federation account to be shared to federal, states and local governments.

The payment, which started in September 2011, was due to an audit, which showed that the NNPC had been under remitting revenue into the Federation Account.

Citizen