Comments from the floor at Daily Trust Dialogue

A cross section of invited guests and members of the audience who attended yesterday’s edition of Daily Trust Annual Dialogue bared their minds while responding to issues raised by the speakers.For Nazifi Abdullahi Darma, associate professor of Development Economics at the University of Abuja,Nigeria’s Public Private Partnership (PPP) framework is one of the weakest in the developing world.

Darwa, who expressed dismay that Nigeria is not paying enough attention to PPP as a means of financing its infrastructure, cited an example of Brazil, saying it budgeted $835 million for capital projects in 2015 and had 75 per cent of that amount provided for though Public Private Partnership.“We need to reverse the PPP” so that “development partners and private capital will come and invest in a clearly defined framework that actually defines what we need to do that is transparent enough and they won’t end up losing their money,” he said.

Condemning what he termed lack of frugality in the way government is spending money at the expense of infrastructural development, Professor Darma said, “if we continue to rely on government revenues towards financing infrastructure, even with a concessionary interest rate of 10 per cent, it will not be able to fill our infrastructure gap.” He said Nigeria’s public infrastructure spending is the highest compared to any other in the world.

He called for revising the Vision 2020 plan into Vision 2030 and incorporating it with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which can achieve the fundamental development yearnings of the country. He said Nigeria should be the driver of its development and set rules for development partners to obey.

Also speaking, Commissioner of Information and Strategy in Adamawa State Ahmad Sajoh said state governments need prudence and fiscal discipline to succeed. He said his state government (Adamawa) imbibed those virtues and is rebuilding areas ravaged by insurgency.The State has been able to rebuild Mubi, especially its roads, since it was one of the hardest hit areas in the state by the Boko Haram, Sajoh said.

“Within 18 months, we have been able to use little resources at our disposal to build up to 66 roads in our state. We succeeded in doing that through prudence, fiscal discipline and morality in governance. We believe in doing the right thing,” he said.

The commissioner, who is also a journalist, observed that journalists in Nigeria are too critical of Nigeria and its institutions. “We are too critical of ourselves. We are celebrating the bad and ignoring the good and positive contributions of quite a number of people and organisations. Until we begin to celebrate our goods, we will continue to get narratives that tell us that we are bad. I know we are not bad,” he said.