Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, says that fraudsters and arbitrators are making as much as between N300 billion and N800 billion from the country’s poor management of its foreign exchange market.
“The Nigerian government leaves between N300 billion and N800 billion to opportunists, rent-seekers, middlemen, arbitrageurs, and fraudsters, by continuing to maintain the current foreign exchange system where the parallel market funds more of Nigeria’s imports than the CBN auction systems” Atiku stated in the policy document available on the campaign organisation’s website.
Atiku promised to deepen monetary and fiscal reforms to promote a stable macro-economic environment if he is elected as Nigeria’s president in the general elections scheduled for February 2019. Atiku is challenging president Muhammadu Buhari, who was elected in 2015.
“Our monetary and fiscal policies shall ensure low inflation rate, stable exchange rate and interest rates that will be supportive of businesses’ quest for credit.
“Our economic policies will be coherent, consistent and therefore, more predictable by the business community. Nothing is more threatening to investment flows than policy flip-flops. We will enforce fiscal discipline by curtailing recurrent spending and ensuring that it is not funded by debt”
On infrastructure, Atiku has also promised to attract up to US$90 billion into infrastructure funding over the next five years through Public-Private Sector Partnerships (PPPs).
“We shall attract and increase the stock of our investment from 15% to 35% of GDP within five years and FDI shall be a key component. FDI is a critical driver of economic growth, especially for a developing economy like Nigeria. It can help raise productivity, competitiveness, and living standards over the long term.”
The overall focus shall be on attracting new investments into the non-oil sector, modernising the agricultural sector to make it attractive for large-scale private investments, improving competitiveness and the external orientation of manufacturing firms and building a dynamic information and communication technology (ICT) sector, for the transformation of Nigeria into a knowledge-driven economy.”
