Professor Yemi Osibanjo, Vice president of Nigeria, shares details of the 22nd Nigerian National Economic Summit.

He wrote about the summit saying;

Today I sat on a panel with some Ministers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria at the National Economic Summit. I was asked a number of questions ranging from ineffective economic policy direction, the investments on infrastructure, policy on education and a few other questions.

Permit me to share a few of the questions that were asked and some of my responses.

Question:

Buhari administration’s investments in infrastructure development.

Answer:

We are investing in the rail sector, we are doing the Port Harcourt-Kano standard gauge, and we are also doing the Lagos-Calabar standard gauge. We have already provided our counterpart funding, t we expect that before the end of the year, the Lagos-Kano line will start.

We are concessioning the existing route to General Electric, they are going to revamp that route and put on the rolling stock and set up logistics all down the way

I think we are quite focused in terms of our projections for power, there are a few problems in the power sector and we are expecting that gas supply will stabilize, we are also investing heavily in solar and other renewable energy sources, even wind.

In the president’s recent address, he talked about the river basin authorities, and improving the hydro plants in all of these river basins.

The cost of building small solar plants is not too expensive, you will find that prices of solar are really tumbling. We have a project just outside Abuja where we are actually installing little solar plants on people’s homes and it will power about four points. 

The total cost of each of those plants will cost under 200 dollars. But those are small domestic points. We have really no choice with using solar because that is obviously an area of natural advantage especially in the north where radiation is the highest.

We have about 1600MW of power coming on stream; the problem of course with solar power is the base load because you need substantial base load for industry. But as far as domestic use is concerned, it still presents that best option that we can find.

Question:

How funds recovered from treasury looters are to be utilized.

Answer

If you look at the 2016 budget, we have a line in that budget; it is about N350bn as what we expect to recover, so we actually provided for it.

It is what we expect.

Obviously we have not been able to recover all that in terms of physical cash, in many cases, for example, we have about almost $400 million outstanding with the United States, we have about $300 million outstanding with the Swiss government.

A lot of what we have recovered, we already made public, it was made public in the president’s address, he stated specific sums, real estate etc.

As we go along, we intend to use that money in the budget. If you look at all of your income, it comes from a source, so if you have N350bn and you get N30bn, it funds some part of the budget.

There is a process, once money comes in, we account for it, we use it to fund the budget.

Some people have suggested that we should use the money to build roads and name it the anti-corruption road, and we think that is bit too dramatic.