Daily Watch – Fashola defends 45% rise in electricity cost, Forex scarcity may trigger fuel shortages

3rd February 2016

  • The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, has defended the 45 percent increment in electricity tariff which takes effect from this month. According to Fashola, that the new costs are the only way to enhance stable power supply in Nigeria. Fashola, who spoke before the Senate’s Committee on Power, explained that the increase in the cost of obtaining raw materials to generate electricity was part of the reasons for increasing the tariff.
  • Nigeria will finally end crude oil swap deals in March, replacing the crude swaps with a “Direct Sale-Direct Purchase System” that will have the NNPC directly sell crude oil to refiners and purchase refined oil products from them. The President had on 13 August, 2015, cancelled the controversial offshore processing and oil swap deals initiated administration of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. The NNPC says that the DSDP arrangement will save Nigeria about $1 billion as all the costs associated with middlemen will now be eliminated.
  • Tunde Fowler, the Chairman of the FIRS, has said that Nigeria earned N3.74 trillion out of a target of N4.57 trillion for the fiscal year ended December 2015. This represents an 8% drop from a year earlier. This is the first time Nigeria will fail to meet its tax collection target since we records started being kept in 2000. A frther breakdown shows that VAT earned the country N767.33 billion which was short of the target of N1.28 trillion. Nigeria earned over N800 billion in VAT in 2014. Another N1.28 trillion was earned from PPT, failing to meet a target of N1.48 trillion. This represents a huge drop of almost 50% of the N2.4 trillion collected in 2014. Nigeria earned N1.29 trillion from corporate income tax out of a target of N1.51 trillion. Corporate income tax was about N1.1 trillion in 2014.
  • Nigeria may experience another round of petrol scarcity in the near future if the naira continues to depreciate in value, particularly against the United States dollar, oil marketers have told The Punch newspaper. Sourcing for dollars to import refined products has become increasingly difficult, with most marketers turning to the parallel market for foreign exchange.
  • A student nurse, who got infected with Lassa fever, has been discharged from the Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido Ekiti, where she had received treatment. The 19-year old student of the FETHI’s School of Nursing was rushed to the hospital a couple of weeks ago, having contracted Lassa fever but is now free of the virus.