The Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, urged the federal government to channel funding to infrastructure and capital projects.
She made this appeal at a virtual seminar titled, ‘Financing Nigeria’s Budget and Infrastructure Deficit through the Capital Market,’ organised by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The minister said that the proof of “the benefit of spending” can be observed in the country’s fourth-quarter GDP growth rate.
She said, “The capital market is a room for various programmes and mechanisms that are targeted at aggregating and channelling long term capital for businesses and development.
“The Nigerian capital market has been doing this for many decades and has the potentials to do more.
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“I want to urge the capital market participants and operators to consider retail investments to give opportunity to the Nigerian citizens to invest within the capital market in an easy and simple way.”
“Nigeria needs to spend and spend now more on infrastructure and other capital projects. A recent evidence of the benefit of spending is the fourth quarter GDP growth rate of the economy which was 0.11% resulting in Nigeria pulling out of recession after two quarters of negative growth.
“This annual growth rate that was initially projected at -3.2% closed the year at -1.92% which is an improvement over most of the countries within our comparative groups.”
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Also present at the event was the Director-General of the Debt Management Office (DMO), Patience Oniha, whose words bolstered those of the finance minister, urging the federal government to target infrastructural projects.
“I think that when we are talking about those innovations like revenue, bonds and all that, we should be talking about policies to ensure that the projects that we financed generate revenue,” Oniha said.
Head of Economic Research and Policy Management Division of the SEC, Afolabi Olowookere, stated that the major source of funding for infrastructure in the country was through “public-private partnership”.
Olowookere advised that the government created a framework of policies that would incentivise “the development of domestic public debt markets.”
