Nigerian govt urged to raise bonds for projects
The Federal Government has been urged to focus on raising bonds from the capital market as a means to financing revenue-generating projects.,
These, among others, were part of the resolutions reached at the Securities and Exchange Commission’s yearly Budget Seminar on Thursday, with the theme ‘Financing Nigeria’s Budget and Infrastructure Deficits through the Capital Market’.
According to participants at the seminar, the government remains an enabler to creating the conducive enabling environment for policies, security and good leadership that will ultimately support business growth and development.
They, therefore, urged the Federal Government to prioritise funding of sectors such as security, education and health while creating an enabling environment for the private sector to fund sectors such as power, transportation and telecoms.
The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, was quoted in a statement as saying that past experiences had shown that the Nigerian capital market had been quite supportive in providing the necessary funds needed to finance government’s needs.
According to her, the market serves as an important channel through which government budget deficits and the economic infrastructure deficits can be financed.
She said the government was committed to introducing more of these instruments in partnership with the capital market to finance projects for economic growth.
Ahmed said, “The capital market is a room for various programmes and mechanisms that are targeted at aggregating and channelling long-term capital for businesses and development.
“The Nigerian capital market has been doing this for many decades and has the potentials to do more. I want to urge the capital market participants and operators to consider retail investments to give opportunity to the Nigerian citizens to invest within the capital market in an easy and simple way.”
The Director-General, SEC, Mr Lamido Yuguda, noted that the 2021 budget proposed a deficit of N5.6trn, and 42 percent of this would be financed using domestic sources.
He said, “It is expected that the capital market will be leveraged to obtain this financing and also that the impact on infrastructure development of the country as well as the general economic conditions will be positive.
“In addition, we also believe that our capital market has the capacity to roll out innovative products to support Nigeria’s infrastructure needs and financing. This is necessary for us as a country to be able to effectively compete with the rest of the world.”
Lamido expressed the belief that the capital market has the capacity to roll out innovative products to support Nigeria’s infrastructure needs and financing.
