•Provides N470bn for university revitalisation, upward adjustment of lecturers’ salariesPresident Muhammadu Buhari has approved the process of restructuring the Ministry of Finance Incorporated , the federal government’s investment vehicle, as part of overall measures to revive over N30 trillion non-performing assets and boost government revenue.
According to her, the process of re-engineering the assets to strip them of bureaucratic tendencies and run effectively as going concerns had commenced. “We are going to open these assets for investments, so we will issue different kinds of equities investments into these assets. The government doesn’t have the kind of resources to recapitalise these assets.
“There is a process that is ongoing, we’ll have MOFI fully set up a world class investment company with a new management and a new board to move from the civil service structure where it sits as a unit under the office of the Accountant General of the Federation, and get core professionals that are really focus and specialised in portfolio management and driving investments to run better.”
She said, “The total Ways and Means today is N20 trillion and we have approval to securitise, then the securitisation will be over a 40-year period with interest rate of nine per cent. The Act stresses that such advances shall not at any time exceed five per cent of the previous year’s actual revenue of the federal government, and that all advances made pursuant to the section shall be repaid as soon as possible; and shall in any event be repayable by the end of the federal government financial year in which they are granted.
She stated that of the nation’s total debt stock of $102 billion, the foreign component was only 35 per cent while 65 per cent was domestic. “The FGN’s contingent liabilities as a percentage of GDP was 2.64 per cent in 2021 compared to 2.75 per cent in 2020. It is projected to be around this region by the end of 2022. Nigeria is not planning on restructuring its debt as it remains committed to meeting its domestic and external debt obligations.
“Our policy target is to keep it at no more than 50% over the medium-term period and ultimately reduce it down to 30 per cent but we are currently over 50 per cent debt service to revenue,” she stressed.