Minister of Budget and National Planning, Sen. Atiku Bagudu, has said that Nigeria must attract at least 100 billion dollars investments annually to become a middle income country by 2050.
Bagudu made statement on Tuesday at a one-day policy dialogue on “Deepening Legislative-Executive Synergy for Effective Economic Governance in Nigeria.
The event was organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) in Abuja.
The minister explained that the agenda 2050 was not an over-ambitious plan, but a realistic pathway to prosperity.
He said that President Bola Tinubu had demonstrated that the dream was realisable and had taken risks never attempted in developing countries adding that the results were beginning to show.
According to him, the renewed hope agenda of President Tinubu is a deliberate attempt to reverse years of weak fiscal capacity and systemic distortions.
He said that without bold choices and stronger synergy between the legislature and the executive, Nigeria risked falling further behind its peers in global economic competitiveness.
“We calculated and to achieve this objective, Nigeria requires at least 100 billion dollars investment per annum from both the private and public sectors.
Agenda 2050 is structured into six medium-term plans, beginning with 2021–2025 and moving in five-year phases until 2050.
“As of June 2023, our revenue-to-GDP ratio stood at nine per cent, one of the lowest in the world, compared to the EU average of 31 per cent; that has now risen to 16 per cent due to recent reforms, but we are still punching below our weight,
“Brazil, a federation like Nigeria, has a federal budget of about 700 billion dollars, while ours is just 36 billion dollars.
“Japan, with roughly half of Nigeria’s population, spends more than 20 trillion dollars annually. These disparities explain why outcomes are inevitably different,” he noted
