Sola Fanawopo
The story of Remita, the Treasury Single Account [TSA] system’s payment gateway, is a Nigerian success story by all standards. Imagine if the payment software was sourced from the United States. The story would have been “How US Software is Driving Nigerian Economy”.
It would have been packaged by International Financial Corporation [IFC] and other international agencies as the solution that would save the emerging economies from doom.
But what has the owners of the software got from those who run Nigeria? Non respect of contracts, insults, name callings and delay in payments of the processing fees.
For whatever reasons, TSA collections fee is the cheapest in the public sector as against NPA/Intel’s Pilotage Services collection fee: 28% (in Forex); Nigeria Customs cost of collections fee: 7%; FIRS cost of collections fee: 4%.
Even the whistle blower earns a whopping 5-10% gbeborun fee. Are we afraid to make billionaire out of our innovators? How do we drive our youths to take more interest in innovation when solution like the TSA gateway is not valued by the government?
The new revelations emerging from the House of Representatives panel probing the status of Treasury Single Account [TSA], chaired by Rep Abubakar Nuhu Danburam (APC, Kano), have been astounding to say the least.
Amongst other disturbing revelations was the fact that the Federal Government owes banks and Systemspecs billions of naira for processing the TSA fund. It is beyond any rational conviction that a platform that has assumed a national monument is being starved of its entitlements.
Why the presidency has been celebrating the success recorded from the implementation of the TSA, the company behind the success is in anguish and pains. Painfully so, the time spent running after the paymaster in Abuja could have been devoted to making the solution more endearing to the users.
My expectation is that by now, the CEO of Systemspecs should be a regular on the President’s entourage whenever the President travels to other African countries. Remita should be packaged as one of our great exports to help other African countries to reform their public treasuries.
That is what other great countries do to buoy their businessmen. This is one of the ways to grow our local innovative businesses. Enterprising Nigerian businesses would readily accept such handholding in order to scale their businesses and globalise their operations.
Now that the Ghanaian government has declared its readiness to implement the TSA system, who is helping Systemspecs reach out to the Ghanaian President?
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