Anambra governor, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo has reconstituted the board of Anambra Internal Revenue Service (AIRS) charging it with the “task to increase the state’s internally generated revenue” and threatening to “disband it and create a new one” if it doesn’t do so within “a three-month life span”.
Soludo took over as governor on March 17 2022. He said after one year, the state’s IGR is “not even close to 50% of what we anticipated to achieve”.
The governor said with the state’s economy at a value of N5 Trillion, he expected “more than N3 billion per month ” in revenues. “As of Monday, we were dangling around N1 billion per month, which is extremely low. You can see how far we are doing in relation to the potentials that exist”, he said.
“The Internal Revenue Service is the lifeblood of all government operations, if it doesn’t work, nothing works”, he said, lamenting that the federal allocations are now unpredictable and unreliable.
But analysts wonder if a muscular drive for taxes and other revenues in a recessed economy is the appropriate government policy or if it is tax reliefs and heavy government investments first.
Last year, Soludo received state parliamentary approval to get loans of up to N100 billion, which he said was to fund critical infrastructure.
The new AIRS board is chaired by Richard Madiebo with Dr Greg Ugochukwu Ezeilo, Dr Christian Madubuko and Mr Benjamin Anierobi Okafor among the executive directors.
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