Mohammed Shehu, chairman of the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) has said some public servants earn bigger salaries than President Muhammadu Buhari.
Mohammed who disclosed this in an interview on Channels Television breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily on Thursday, also said as much as N7 trillion unremitted funds were lost to some government’s Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs.
He said, “The salary of Mr President is not up to N1,300,000 a month…the allowances of the President are factored into that salary.
”In 2008, that was considered a big money but now, there are people in the private sector and public sector that earn twice, three times, four times.”
Mohammed said some staff of government agencies like the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, the Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, among others, earn emoluments bigger than the President’s.
According to him, the NPA, which is one of the agencies with high revenues, generated over N172 billion in the first half of 2022.
He noted that Nigeria had about 17 different salary categories across several agencies, and, therefore, proposed the regularisation of the salary schemes for the civil service.
While insisting that no public official should earn more than the President, the RMAFC boss said: “What I was saying that time is that no public servant should earn salaries bigger than Mr President’s but we do have public servants that earn bigger than Mr President: NCC, NIMASA, NPA, Central Bank.”
He also said some government officials got as high as N500million as severance package but noted that the President gets N10m after his tenure.
The RMAFC chairman equally said his commission would soon implement the upward review of the salaries of judicial officers and subsequently review salaries of public officers to reflect current socio-economic realities.
On whether the government could afford to increase salaries in the face of declining revenues, he lamented the situation where some government agencies spend all the monies they generate, saying there were up to N7 trillion unremitted revenues in some agencies.
Consequently, he tasked the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, to go after the culpable agencies.
