Nigeria’s economic growth is weak, needs more taxes, diaspora funds – Finance minister

Nigeria’s economy may have been growing over the last seven quarters, but this growth rate is not strong enough to drive the needed developments in the country, and for this to happen, more people need to pay their taxes. This was one of the views expressed by Zainab Ahmed, minister of finance during a plenary session at the ongoing 28th Nigerian Economic Summit (NES28).

These consecutive quarters of economic growth have not resulted in improved standards of living for the average Nigerian, as alluded to by the minister, who said cost of living continues to rise while people can afford fewer things. Yet, the economy is said to be growing.

“We seek to have a Nigeria that is growing on a consistent basis; strong growth, not the type of fragile growth that we have right now,” she said. The minister further said in order to be able to grow at a minimum of 5 percent on a year-on-year basis and expand earnings will require “resetting the social contract that we have with the citizens, for every Nigerian to understand that they must of necessity contribute to the development by paying their taxes.”

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According to Ahmed, the current situation is one in which there is a lacklustre attitude to tax payments. While she says work has been done to enhance the capacity and efficiency of the tax authorities, “there must be that spirit of pride of being a Nigerian by wanting to pay your taxes so that you can contribute to development,” she said.

She also highlighted the need to focus more on diversification, noting that while different sectors are at different levels of growth there are none of the sectors that is growing high enough. “Except for maybe the information and technology sector that continues to grow consistently,” she added. For her, the agriculture sector has been reporting growth but the growth has been slow and according to her, not what Nigeria needs.

“We need to be able to really grow agriculture on an exponential basis, and it means we have to concentrate on not just production, but as well as the processing and exporting agricultural produce to be able to earn foreign exchange income,” she said.

The minister also said that Nigeria must be able to mobilise external resources, not loans here but sources like the Diaspora. “We must design programs and projects that will be instruments that will incentivise diasporans to bring in their resources into our country and actually select projects that they want to invest in developing,” she said.