EDITORIAL: Excess Crude Account is dead, bury it
FISCAL recklessness has reached its pinnacle with the depletion of the Excess Crude Account to a pitiable $71 million. In a now familiar pattern, within a mere month, the Federal Government raided the already atrophied buffer from $324.96 million in mid-January to mid-February 2020 and the country is left without effective fiscal buffers even as global oil prices drop and debts and the cost of governance spike.
While the Obasanjo administration that conceived it built it to $22 billion on leaving office in mid-2007, its successors immediately began raiding the fund even as oil prices moved up. As Chukwuma Soludo, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria when the account was created, explained, that the government started saving when crude prices hovered at $30 per barrel.
Just as the Petroleum Development Trust Fund and the Ecological Fund were raided and used for purposes outside of their stated objectives, the Buhari regime, like Yar’Adua’s and Jonathan’s, has been drawing from the ECA for “security,” petrol subsidy, elections and others. Ahmed confessed that over N1 trillion was withdrawn for security operations in the North-East between 2017 and 2019. Between January 2012 and December 2018, N6.48 trillion was withdrawn and only N4.
Kuwait’s hefty SWF enabled it to underwrite the devastation of the Iraqi invasion and occupation of 1990/91 and to weather fiscal deficits in 2015/16; Algeria has its $50 billion plus SWF to fall back on to combat its current deficits.
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