A well-known economist ,Aliyu Yusha’u on Thursday urged the FCT Administration’s newly established Economic Planning, Revenue Generation, and Public Private Partnership Secretariat to devise new ways to improve internal revenue generation and lowering governance expenses.
He said, the Secretariat has a monumental task of galvanizing all stakeholders to find areas where sustainable investment could be made to scale up revenue production, in a telephone interview with our correspondent.
While saying that the government’s declining revenue necessitates a high-tech solution to help the administration maintain revenue production while carrying out its responsibilities of providing services to FCT inhabitants despite rising costs of governance.
He further added that the cost of governance is occasioned by the geometric increase in the influx of people from other parts of the country into the FCT thereby making it one of the fastest growing cities in the world.
Yusha’u hinted that the Secretariat has to prioritize the transportation system in FCT by working hard to attract investors that can standardised it and make it efficient and profitable.
He also explained that several opportunities for agricultural value chains that can be exploited exist for the Secretariat to take advantage of.
While he said that if the administration wants to reduce cost of governance, there was need to provide world class infrastructural development, which both working and non working classes of residents can leverage to build economic capacity.
According to him,” In my own opinion, unless we coordinate economic activities, there is no way we can profer solutions to our budgetary deficiencies, so therefore the creation of that Secretariat is a welcome development.
” First of all, there is need to identify areas of where the Public will capacity and interests, these two things must be put into cognizance.
” Then create an awareness and go ahead to institutionalize the body that can coordinate investors within the city, Nigeria and outside the country. You also have to look at the challenges of the city , identify the basic challenges of the city.
” One of the basic challenges in FCT, is deficient transportation system, the residents, especially those at the suburb depends on transportation system.
” The new Secretariat has to find a way to make the transport system standard and look for investors both within and outside Nigeria”, he said.
