From Uche Usim, Abuja
In line with its strategic blueprint of pooling funds to handle various developmental projects, the Managing Director of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI), Dr. Armstrong Katang, at the weekend, said a cocktail of approaches were on the table to realise a N100 trillion capital target.
Top on the option list, he said, is unlocking liquidity from the federal government’s idle assets.
He made this known at the quarterly Forum in collaboration with the Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) in Abuja.
According to him, MOFI would also mobilise and invest capital in identified opportunities that are consistent with the nation’s economic and social development agenda.
He revealed that the proposed National Assets Registry (NAR) was critical to re-setting the Nigerian economic narrative, as MOFI could leverage its balance sheet – including newly enumerated assets – to secure funding and guarantees from strategic partners.
According to him, the narrative on Nigeria’s economy which emphasized the huge debt owed by the country without regard to the nation’s assets was an incomplete one and must be changed.
“The conversation that speaks of what we owe but does not speak of what we own is not a complete conversation.”
Katang, the nation has many assets spread across the country and indeed across the globe with some of them totally abandoned and that a National Asset Registry must be developed for the nation to know what it actually owns and how best to put the asset to use, in the interest of the Nigerian public.
“Knowing the assets will help us to know which of the assets we can let g; which ones we can keep. There are assets that are yielding zero interests, yet we are borrowing at about 9 per cent interest. Many of our properties abroad have been confiscated because they are not generating any revenue to even pay for utilities or even security,” the CEO said.
The CEO of the restructured MOFI said that the organization had been passive and represented a mere piece of legislation until February this year when the federal government took steps to make a proper institution with a governance structure.
One of the tasks of his team, Dr. Katang said, would be to ensure that all government investments yielded the expected dividend, as according to him, some of such investments in the past yielded no dividend at all.
He said that in investment, there was nothing like middle ground and that an investor would either add value to the capital or lose it.
The MOFI boss argued that the nation should have at least $1 trillion dollars to manage by now if its assets had been managed well, as was the case of Singapore which shared a similar historical background with Nigeria.
Contrary to the notion bandied by many economists, in their argument for the privatization of public enterprises in the country that government had no business in business, Dr. Katang insisted that although the government might not be at the drivers’ seat, government would always be in business, as was the case with many developed economies of the world.