Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has said that the administration is investing heavily in infrastructure because it is convinced the effort will translate into economic growth for the country.
A statement by the Special Adviser, Minister of Finance, Mr Festus Akanbi, said Osinbajo made this known at the African Development Bank Knowledge Sharing Forum in Abuja on Thursday.
Osinbajo, represented by the Special Adviser to the President on the Economy, Dr Yemi Dipeolu, said there was a positive relationship between infrastructure and growth in the economy.
He said Nigeria would experience growth given the commitment of the present administration to invest hugely in infrastructure.
The vice president said, “there are also various estimates about the impact of infrastructure on growth but the broad consensus is that the relationship is a positive one.
“Accordingly, given its significant infrastructure deficit, Nigeria is most likely to experience growth if significant investment is made in the building of roads, bridges, railways, ports, housing, dams, and the likes.
“In the 2016 budget, government has proposed to spend N1.84 trillion on capital projects, amounting to about 30 per cent of the entire budget.
“Even though this is unprecedented in recent times, there is a realization that this figure is still way below what the country should ideally be investing in infrastructure.”
Osinbajo explained that estimates showed that Nigeria required about $25billion annually for the next 10 years to grow its infrastructure to sustainable levels.
He said it was obvious that this could not be funded entirely by the public sector, hence the Public-Private Partnership model was brought to the forefront of considerations.
The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, restated the commitment of the administration to improve the operation of the Public-Private Partnership arrangement.
According to her, the Federal Government believes that Public-Private Partnership is extremely important to the drive to restore and resolve the infrastructure of the country.
Adeosun said that solving the nation’s infrastructure problem would unlock the potential of the economy and get Nigeria out of the current challenges.
“As far as our financial strategy is concerned, we are very committed to PPP.
”And for us, the way to accelerate it is for the Federal Government to de-risk the involvement of the private sector and gradually, introduce the private sector to the PPP.
“This is because if we wait for every law to be changed and regulations to be amended, we will really not get any single project done,” she said
Adeosun said the Federal Government would start with a number of transactions in 2017, and would use the federal guarantee to simply take the risk away from the risky avarices of the projects. (NAN)
