My attention has been drawn this morning to an article entitled: “Jonathan Replies Soludo over “missing N30 trillion” claim”— extracting from Mr. President’s interview as published by Thisday newspaper. ThisDay quoted Mr. President as saying that “Soludo said that under Ngozi’s watch they stole N30 trillion” but that since the sum of the federal budget over the last four years was less than N30 trillion, such an amount could not have been “stolen”. According to the President, “it is all political”. I had earlier stated that I would not make further comments on the issues until probably after the elections but since Mr. President has decided to join the fray, I am constrained to make a further brief clarification. For me, President Jonathan is a gentleman and a friend but I have a fundamental disagreement on his management of the economy. On the issues at stake, I believe that the pressures of office and the hectic electioneering campaigns have not allowed him time to read my articles or that his staff have not explained the contents to him hence he totally missed the point in his comments. For the avoidance of doubt, let me clarify as follows:

1. In my article entitled “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Missing Trillions”, I presented some rough calculations covering: oil theft, money that ought to accrue to stock of foreign reserves, unbudgeted oil subsidy payments, customs duty waivers, leakages through the self-financing government parastatals, unremitted sums by NNPC, etc. I concluded that section of my article by noting that: “I have a long list but let me wait for now. I do not want to talk about other ‘black pots’ that impinge on national security. My estimate, Madam, is that probably more than N30 trillion has either been stolen or lost or unaccounted for or simply mismanaged under your watchful eyes in the past four years”.

2. It is evident that the monies I referred to are “off-budget”. These are monies that did not make it to the budget. I find it funny that the Government deliberately avoided the issues raised above but instead has sought to divert attention by focusing on the “federal budget”. Let me state for the record that I believe that the amount of resources that are either stolen from the economy or out-rightly mismanaged by government far exceeds the federal budget per annum. Ours is about a N100 trillion economy, and I will be shocked if the government pretends that it does not know that currently about 10% of the GDP falls into a ‘black hole’ on annual basis. We have not added figures based on counterfactual analysis such as the cost to the aggregate economy of bad or misguided economic policy.

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http://monitor9ja.com/2015/02/charles-soludo-president-jonathan-missed-point-missing-n30-trillion/

Brb