Babatunde Fashola, minister of works and housing on Friday said the All Progressives Congress (APC) led Federal Government is creating wealth through infrastructure development which provides jobs and market for goods and services.
This is also as Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance, budget and national planning said infrastructural development in the country has been made possible by adequate funding and increased budgetary allocations to the ministry of works which climbed from about N18 billion in 2015 to over N500 billion in 2022.
The ministers spoke at a policy conference organised by the APC pre-convention conference sub-committee to discuss the current and future policy direction of the party in Abuja.
Fashola while identifying the economic impact of infrastructure projects said: “On the second Niger Bridge, 19 million litres of diesel is going to be used from start to finish, tons of cement, tons of steels, millions cubic metres of sand.
“The construction companies do not manufacture these things, but immediately a contract is awarded, it starts driving a chain of supply and demand. Infrastructure is the way to really distribute money in an economy.”
The former Lagos State governor reminded Nigerians that no matter the problem the country has, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is not a solution.
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He said the ruling All Progress Congress (APC) administration was confronting the major problems of infrastructure as evident in the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Second Niger Bridge, Boro -Bonny Apapa, Abuja-Kaduna and many others.
“All of these roads seem to define solutions. The Buhari-APC-led government is confronting them in collaboration with state governors and many of them will be completed this year or before the end of this administration,” Fashola said.
On her part, Ahmed said Nigeria’s economy is now fully diversified due to different economic intervention strategies introduced by the Buhari-led APC government.
She also said the Federal Government Social Investment Programme was yielding positive results as Nigeria has emerged as the nation with the fastest growing social investment programme in the world.
“We have grown our revenues and moved away from dependency on oil revenues to non-oil. What we have to do is actually deepen diversification, expand and grow the individual sectors to do more because the capacity is there, although we have a lot of challenges.
“Domestic revenue mobilisation is a key focus in the ministry of finance, budget and national planning and we set out by designing a programme that we call Strategic Revenue Growth Initiative. Through this initiative, we have been able to grow our revenues and make it a major source of income,” the minister stated.
Kayode Fayemi, Ekiti State governor and co-chairman of the pre-convention committee, lamented how the PDP administration put Nigeria on the path of retrogression being salvaged by APC.
Fayemi said: “That is why I said to you that there is a huge difference between the PDP and APC. That’s why I hate to hear that all parties are the same. I can tell you with our own experience in Ekiti and you may also see that in other states where we (APC) are in control.
In his address, chairman of the pre-convention committee and governor of Borno State, Babagana Zulum stated that insecurity in the northeast has greatly improved compared to what was obtained before.
Zulum, however, insisted that it is not yet ‘Uhuru’ as more still needed to be done to get all displaced people by the insurgency resettled, saying local intelligence was key to the success attained.
