The lawmaker stated this on Sunday in Abuja at a media parley with journalists.
Afuape, a trained economist and member of the House Committee on Finance, also identified leakages as one of the major challenges hindering revenue collection at both the dtate and Federal levels.
He said, “We have a lot of challenges in the aspect of revenue collection. We need to digitise our ways of collecting revenues if we want to stop leakages. One thing is to say we want to block leakages, and in blocking leakages, you also need to take care of people that collect those revenues.”
According to him, it is almost impossible to stop public revenue from getting stolen if the government fails to prioritise the welfare of the collectors.
He continued, “If I am a customs officer in charge of collecting revenue of N100,000 from someone and my salary is just about N20,000; if I am offered N50,000 at once, there is every tendency that there will be temptation.
“What are we doing? How much is the policeman with a gun out there on the street earning per month? We need to look at Nigeria holistically and change the way we do things.
“Apart from leakages, there are a lot of untapped resources in the country that we can generate revenue from. We cannot afford to be wasteful, we need to do things differently and think outside the box, to make Nigeria greater than what it is now. To do this, we need money.”
Speaking on the N27.5 trillion proposed 2024 budget, Afuape said until enough money is generated to fund it, not much would come the way of Nigerians whose lives the Appropriation Bill aims to impact positively.
“The Nigerian economy should not be a N28 trillion economy with our population. If you divide it, what is our per capita income with the N28 trillion ? But we have a lot of things that can generate revenue for Nigeria that we are yet to explore.
“I have said that even if the budget is a surplus one, if we don’t make the money, it will turn into a negative budget. A negative budget can turn into a positive budget if you make more money than you envisaged and that is part of the things we need to do.
“But if we don’t make the money, Nigeria cannot move forward and we must ask questions, do our oversight function diligently, effectively and efficiently. This is the only way we can help the nation and write our names in gold,” he added.
That said, the lawmaker took a swipe at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, accusing it of failing to remit revenue into the nation’s coffers over the years.
“The NNPCL has not remitted any money to the federation account over the years. What are we doing about it? Who is investigating NNPCL?” he asked even as he called on fellow lawmakers to remain on the side of the people while going about their job as legislators.
Commending the 10th Assembly under the leadership of Speaker Tajudeen Abbas for the number of bills passed in the past six months, Afuape reminded his colleagues not to forget that “It is not about how many motions or bills adopted or passed” but how impactful the legislative instruments are on the lives of the people.
