--Advertisement--

No minister of state, slash salaries… Nigerians suggest solutions to oil crash

Nigerian Twitter users are trying to help the government figure out policies that the government can use to get the economy back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic has caused a halt to economic activities across multiple sectors and the International Monetary Fund projects that the Nigerian economy will experience its worst recession in 33 years.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Joe Abah, the former director-general of the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE), asked followers governance questions and Nigerians attempted to find a solution to the country’s economic problems.

Here are the questions he posed:

Advertisement

“Assume you’re the president of Nigeria or governor of your state. You’ve recently raised the minimum wage from N18,000 to N30,000. Oil prices have now crashed. COVID-19 lockdown has decimated your revenue collection. What will you do? Sack some staff? What?

“Assume that because of the crash in oil prices and crash in revenue as a result of COVID-19, you approach NASS or your State House of Assembly to reduce their salaries & allowances, but they threaten to block your bills and even impeach you, what will you do?

“The biggest component of the cost of governance is personnel costs (salaries and allowances). Total NASS budget is about N120 billion. Total FGN Personnel cost is about N2 trillion. Even if you totally delete NASS, you only save N120 billion. What else will you cut?”

Advertisement

Here are some of the responses below:

Advertisement

A number of people seemed to favour slashing salaries and allowances. See their responses:

Advertisement

https://twitter.com/UdochukwuOkenwa/status/1252873396829872128

The idea of salary cuts did not go well with some people. Rather than cut wages, they proposed other solutions.

Add a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error: Content is protected from copying.