Nigeria has paid more than $1,177 billion dollars to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) as its Community Levy contribution in the last 16 years.

According to documents from a presentation by the ECOWAS Commission to Parliament at Plenary during its Virtual Second Extraordinary Session, Nigeria paid 853,310,564 UA (West Africa Unit of Account) for the period under review.

The West African Unit of Account (WAUA) is the authorised currency used in ECOWAS. The exchange rate for July obtained from ECOWAS shows that one Unit of Account equals 1.3799633 dollars.

Nigeria’s payment represents 40.42 per cent of the total payment of 2,913,088,908 dollars payment made by all the 15 member states, and is higher than payments made by 12 other countries put together except Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

Ghana paid about 508,577 million dollars, Cote d’Ivoire 347,262 million dollars, while Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo paid a total of 879,711 million dollars.

Ghana’s payment represents 17.45 per cent of the total sum, Cote d’Ivoire 11.9 per cent, while the cumulative payment by the other 12 countries represents 30.1 per cent.

Within the period under review, Guinea Bissau paid the lowest amount of 6, 204 million dollars, representing 0.2 per cent of total community levy proceeds in the 16 years under review.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Community levy was adopted in 1996 by the Authority of Heads of State as the major funding for ECOWAS after the initial contribution regime seemed ineffective.