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Recently, the Federal Inland Revenue Service, now renamed the Nigeria Revenue Service, released revenue data that showed Lagos alone contributes an estimated 50% of VAT revenue generated in Nigeria. The Southwest combined is responsible for almost 65% of the VAT revenue gathered in Nigeria.
Oyo State alone contributed three times what the entire five states of the Southeast combined came up with.
Yet, after contributing this lion’s share, the Southwest got only 25% of what it contributed. The rest went to other regions.
Interestingly, not one single prominent person from the Southwest complained about marginalisation or cheating. Please fact-check me. Name even one prominent Lukumi Yoruba person who complained.
Nobody ever shouts marginalisation when the Southwest and South-South collectively generate the vast majority of Nigeria’s wealth and foreign exchange.
Yet, sadly, when President Tinubu does something for these two zones, people rise and criticise him for shortchanging other regions.
How can Nigeria make sustained progress under these conditions?
We need to be as focused on revenue generation as we are on revenue sharing.
For instance, on road construction, of the four most expensive roads being constructed in Nigeria, only one is in the South. The other three are mainly in the North, though some parts touch the South.
They are as follows:
The 750-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway being built for ₦15 trillion.
The 1068-kilometre Illela-Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway being built for ₦13 trillion.
The 465-kilometre Trans-Saharan Road being constructed at a price of an estimated $750 million.
And, the 439-kilometre Akwanga-Jos-Bauchi-Gombe Road, which costs $1.33 billion.
You may ask why the 750-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway costs ₦2 trillion more than the much longer 1068-kilometre Illela-Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway.
It is because while the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway passes through the difficult Niger-Delta terrain of mangroves, swamps and marshland, the Illela-Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway does not.
However, due to terrain issues, the Illela-Sokoto-Badagry Superhighway is actually more expensive than the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway.
And when you move on to railways, the two single most expensive railway projects currently ongoing in Nigeria are all in the North, including the 284 kilometre Kano-Maradi railway project being built at a price tag of $1.96 billion, and the 1343 kilometre Lagos–Kano Standard Gauge Railway, which will cost $2.5 billion, of which $1.2 billion of that will be expended on the Kaduna-Kano portion of the project.
If only we as Nigerians can focus on facts, rather than on politics, when talking about economic and social development, we will see that the reason why our GDP has grown by $67 billion in just two years of President Tinubu
moving from ₦269.29 trillion to ₦372.8 trillion, is because the President is using his skills as a cum laude (First Class) accountant to attract capital which is developing Nigeria uniformly.
That being the case, let us stop rocking the boat and distracting his and the Presidency’s attention from building to explaining.
If we must quarrel about revenue sharing, then in all fairness, we should also have to quibble about revenue generation.
