Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - 10:48
Following the crisis rocking the country from state governors not been able to pay their workers salaries. The country's president, General Muhammadu Buhari has stepped in and he has approved 400Billion Naira to help the governors pay their workers salaries.
The money released is a comprehensive relief package and it is meant to end the plight of unpaid workers' salaries. The packages include :
- The sharing of about $2.1b (N413.7bn) in fresh allocation between the states and the federal government. The money is sourced from recent LNG proceeds to the federation account, and its release okayed by the president;
- A Central Bank-packaged special intervention fund that will offer financing to the states, ranging from between N250bn to N300bn. This would be a soft loan available to states to access for the purposes of paying backlog of salaries;
- And a debt relief program proposed by the Debt Management Office, DMO, which will help states restructure their commercial loans currently put at over N660bn, and extend the life span of such loans while reducing their debt-servicing expenditures.