By Musa Adamu
Abuja
Minister of state for Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, has said that Nigeria, today, has described a Nigeria safe haven rife for foreign investors to exploit and enjoy profitably.
She gave the assurance when a delegation of foreign investors led by a former National Planning, Dr Shamefaced Usman, visited her in Abuja recently.
The delegation of is made up of investors from the United States, United Kingdom, Middle East, China, France, South Africa and visited under the auspices of renaissance capital investments (RCI), and was in Nigeria to discuss business prospects in the country.
While explaining Nigeria’s present favourable business environment, Mrs Zainab explained the rationale behind the N6 trillion 2016 budget.
She said: “Our N6,08 trillion budget is designed to stimulate and reflate our economy, we are making conscious efforts at reducing barriers of doing business in Nigeria. Our government is heavily fighting corruption and insecurity challenges is almost successfully tackled.”
She also stated that the 2016 budget, which is zero based, was designed to reflate the economy for the creation of jobs and boost the productive sectors of the economy.
She added that the budget would be monitored closely through the robust monitoring &evaluation (M&E) mechanism put in place by the ministry to ensure funds were released based on result performance.
Accordingly, she further disclosed that the federal government was building an economy that would not suffer oil prices shocks.
She also disclosed that efforts were in place to prevent leakages in the system targeted at boosting investor’s confidence.
Responding to the observation raised on the unrealistic non-oil revenue projections in the 2016 budget since Nigerians do not like paying taxes, the minister reiterated that since bulk of revenue required to run the budget would be from non- oil sector.
“We have gaps in the area of tax collection, but our revenue collecting agencies have a revenue target. There are efforts to register large number of Nigerians especially the informal businesses not registered in to our tax base. Efforts will also be put to prevent leakages.”
In his remarks on behalf of the group, Dr. Usman commended the closer link between planning and budget and praised the ministry’s effort to update the vision 20:2020 and also reactivating of the based management.