Nigeria Too Big to Fail, Says Adeosun at World Bank Forum

• Nigeria Too Big to Fail

Nigeria took its economic survival struggle to the international financial audience yesterday and said it is too significant a country to fail.

Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun speaking on the sideline of the plenary session of the 2016 IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington DC said: “Nigeria is too big to fail and too significant in the region to underperform.”

She vowed that the federal government would do all within its power to rescue the economic from the current free fall.

She was reacting to calls by the World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim and the IMF managing director Ms. Christine Largard for massive investment in infrastructure.

Her words: “ what we are trying to do is to rewrite Nigeria’s economic story so that we can grow, and to grow we need critical infrastructure like power, transport, housing.

“ These are where we are redirecting expenditure from our recurrent where we thought there have been a lot of waste and leakages.”

Government,she added is “redirecting spending to capital to create long term value.It’s tough in the short term but the long term benefits will be there for the future generation, we are confident of getting back to growth.

“If we invest in critical infrastructure there will be increased productivity, which will lead to job creation and prosperity for our people and it is very comforting to hear this coming from the highest levels that that is the way to go.”

Adeosun stated that Nigeria has aligned with the views of the multilateral institutions with regards to inclusive growth, stating that inclusive growth is one of the objectives of this administration to end poverty.

Government she noted is “investing heavily in education and as part of our social intervention programme we aim to engage more young graduates into primary schools because education,I’m sure, we will be soon start seeing improvements in our education indices.”

Also speaking, Central Bank (CBN) governor Godwin Emefiele said the three pronged comprehensive approach of monetary, fiscal and structural reforms “is the way everybody has to go and we are doing that in Nigeria.

“There is serious collaboration between the monetary and fiscal authorities and if we continue in this direction we will achieve these objectives.”