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Henry Uche
Foreign investments inflows into Nigeria climbed to $14billion in half year 2019, signalling upswing in investors’ confidence, according to the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed.
In a statement from Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), the minister said in spite of this feat, Nigeria needed a lot of resources to actualise the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) and other development plans, which were at risk of being underfunded.
She disclosed this while speaking on a panel tagged “Strengthening Domestic Revenue Mobilization” at the just-concluded 2019 World Bank/IMF meetings in Washington DC, USA.
“As a sign of increased investors’ confidence in our economy, there were remarkable inflows of foreign capital in the second quarter of 2019. The total value of capital imported into Nigeria increased from $12 billion in the first half year of 2018 to $14 billion for the same period in 2019, she said.
On revenue performance, she said Nigeria has recorded improvement on both revenue outturns and revenue to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio.
“Our revenue outturn as at December 2018 was 55 per cent, while it was 58 percent as at June 2019. Our revenue to GDP ratio on the other hand is 8 percent as at end of June 2019, while it was 5 percent as at December 2017,” she said. She noted that the infrastructure master plan requires about $3triillion over the next 30 years to sufficiently address our infrastructure deficit. “To achieve all these, we need fiscal sufficiency and buoyancy, which must come through domestic revenues for it to be sustainable. she added.
On changing this trajectory, she said: “we have very low effective tax rates, archaic tax laws that are not evolving at commensurate pace with businesses, leakages in our revenue collection systems, low tax compliance rates and poor tax morale to mention a few. With numerous complex issues at hand, Nigeria must do things differently which requires robust, tough, well-coordinated and multi-faceted reforms.
