President Muhammadu Buhari this morning had a meeting behind closed doors with the governors of the 36 states The Nation reports.
The meeting was held at the Council Chambers of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
The focus of the meeting was to provide a solution to the problem of outstanding salaries in some states.
The meeting was called after the 36 state governors made an appeal for a presidential intervention into the empty accounts and inability to pay civil and state servants their salary.
The meeting started with the arrival of the president at 10.10am.
It was gathered that some of the states were being owed between N10 billion and N50 billion.
The meeting between President Buhari and the state governors ended with a resolution to end the financial crisis being faced by some state governments, Punch reports.
The Zamfara state Governor, Abdulazeez Yari, stated this while addressing state house correspondents at the end of the meeting.
According to Yari, instead of bailouts, the governors requested for the refund of federal government projects they carried out in their states.
He also said the governors asked that the tax paid by the Nigeria Natural Liquefied Gas Company be paid into the Federation Account and be shared as stipulated by the constitution.
According to Punch, the states present at the meeting are Rivers, Ogun, Imo, Gombe, Benue, Delta, Niger, Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, Kogi, Borno and Jigawa states.
Others were governors of Kebbi, Kwara, Taraba, Ekiti, Ondo, Kaduna, Oyo, Osun, Edo, Anambra, Sokoto, Ebonyi, Lagos, Adamawa, Cross Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Yobe States.
While Plateau and Bayelsa states were represented by their deputy governors.
Abia, Bauchi, Enugu, and Nasarawa states were however absent from the meeting.
Meanwhile, President Buhari has said that Nigeria’s “treasury is virtually empty” and lamented that workers across the country were owed backlog of salaries.
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