NIGERIA WANTS $20BN INFRASTRUCTURE SPEND OVER TEN YEARS

Nigeria plans to spend $20-billion on
infrastructure over the next ten years and will introduce an infrastructure
bond in 2019 as Africa’s biggest oil producer seeks to address challenges in
revenue generation.

“Our target is that we’d like to see infrastructure
spending increase to the $10-billion to $20-billion range over the next five to
ten years because we think that’s the level of our need,” Okechukwu Enelamah, the Minister for
trade and investment, said on Wednesday.

The government will partner with other stakeholders
to raise funding. A committee of the ministers of finance, budget, trade and
investment and works, housing and power, and other government agencies was
immediately set up to work out modalities.

They “will work together to get their
recommendations to the cabinet on how to increase our infrastructure spending
significantly,” Enelamah said.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who was just re-elected, is seeking lawmakers’
approval to spend 8.8 trillion-naira ($24.4-billion) in the 2019 budget.
Upgrading inadequate infrastructure is among his priorities for this second
four-year term, along with improving security and strengthening an economy,
which contracted in 2016.

The government will introduce an infrastructure
bond this year, Minister of Finance Zainab Ahmed told a senate hearing on the 2019 budget.

“There are challenges in revenue generation,” Ahmed
said. “We intend to borrow both locally and internationally, improve on our
local borrowing, introduce an infrastructure bond and to identify new and
enhance an existing revenue stream,” she said.

Nigeria’s 2019 budget, presented by Buhari in
December, envisaged the government issuing about 1.65 trillion naira ($4.6
billion) of new debt, half of which would be in foreign currency.

While the West African nation has mostly used the Eurobond market for its external funding in recent years, it will prioritize borrowing from concessional lenders such as the World Bank and African Development Bank as it looks to rein in rising interest payments, Patience Oniha, the head of the Debt Management Office, said on March 19. http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/nigeria-wants-20bn-infrastructure-spend-over-ten-years-2019-03-28