Nigeria Has Learnt Its Lesson From Its Recent Experience With Recession - Kemi Adeosun

The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has assured Nigerians that the focus on infrastructure by the President Muhammadu Buhari led administration will unlock the desired economic growth in the country.

Adeosun made this declaration in an interview with CNBC on the side-lines of the ongoing IMF/World Bank annual meeting in Washington DC, United States, on Friday, revealing that the Federal Government is making a significant progress in its negotiation with the World Bank and the African Development Bank for budget support.

“What we have applied for is budget support facility from the World Bank and with the AfDB,” she said.

“AfDB is at the advanced stage and for the World Bank, we have submitted a letter of development policy. Hopefully we are going into negotiation as next steps here. ‎We are therefore on course with raising the concessionary financing we wanted.”

“What we have is budget support facilities, which we designed ourselves. We are on course. We are going first to domestic market, followed by the Concessionary market, then to the Eurobond market; we are very much on course.

“The Federal Government has already spent about N770 billion on capital between the time the budget was passed in May and that the government was planning the next release.

“This is being funded by a combination of our IGR and the money raised from domestic market which will be complemented with what we will raise from international market.”

The Minister also expressed confidence in the ability of the Federal Government to achieve its economic plan within the set time frame.

“When we started this journey, the plan was around fiscal consolidation and trying to remove the economy from consumption-driven to investment-driven. We are beginning to see the dividends in terms of reducing our recurrent expenditure, with releases into fiscal space to allow us take care of infrastructure,” she added.

“The current stability in crude oil price is a good development for the Nigerian economy. The oil price has stabilized, of course a good news in the short term and in the middle term.“Infrastructure is the key to growth and on the fact that the money was released to major projects; roads, rail, airports etc. ‎Infrastructure will unlock the needed growth in the economy.

“We expect the oil price to be stable, it is good for us. We need predictability of revenue. One of the problems we face now is that oil price is very volatile and our revenue is volatile. Predictability will enable us plan.”

In spite of this optimism, the Minister said Nigeria has learnt its lesson from its recent experience with recession.

“We have learnt our lessons, we have seen the oil price gone up as high as $110 in the past and the lesson we have learnt really is it is not about how high the oil price is or how low but how well we spend the money and then we have spent a lot of time to reform how we spend.

“In terms of our planning, we have been conservative. I believe benchmark staying well below $50 so that we are safe and we are not subject to any fluctuation in oil price.

“In the past, there were joint ventures which were funded from the treasury and it is called the cash-call arrangement. We need to get out of cash calls.

“There is private money available which can be used to fund oil exploration and we have signed agreement through the NNPC with oil majors to do the modified arrangement where we borrow money from the local market, pay for further private capital and we will get oil output.

“More importantly for us, it releases the output because one of the challenges in Nigeria was that we were not meeting up with the cash call arrangement, we couldn’t meet our obligations and that means the quantity of oil we could have been producing, we weren’t producing it.

“By moving out into the private space where there is money, I don’t see any reason why we won’t be able to meet our quota,” she said.