The Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) has said it’s freeing up its investments and assets in some of its enterprises worth over N30 trillion for private investors.
The investments are under the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI), which is saddled with the responsibility of managing government assets.
Some of the going concern listed for potential private equity investments include: the Bank of Industry (BOI), the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN), Galaxy Backbone and several other revenue yielding government agencies.
The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning Mrs Zainab Ahmed disclosed this on Tuesday in Abuja during the public presentation of the 2023 budget details.
“We started the process of re-engineering the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI), saddled with the responsibility of managing government assets. MOFI has been existing for many years and has gradually become quite inefficient.
So, We have got the president’s approval to start the process of re-engineering MOFI and we are now at the stage where we hope in the next one month or six weeks, we will be able to relaunch MOFI* the Minister explained.
Speaking further she said: “We’ve been able to take stock of the assets that are in the books of MOFI and even without taking stock of the ones that are not in the books of MOFI, we have about N30 trillion in terms of assets size. So, if we are looking for a debt of N10 trillion, we already have assets of N30 trillion.”
Mrs. Ahmed further stated that the FG will “open these assets for investments. So we will issue different kinds of equities investments into these assets. The government doesn’t have the kind of resources to recapitalise these assets.”
“When I talk about assets, I am talking about our investments like the Bank of Industry (BOI), the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN), Galaxy Backbone and several other agencies of government: Companies that government has set-up. A few of them are doing well and delivering the books but our assessment is what they’re doing can still be better by incremental adjustments” she said..
For instance, she said the “railways in the books of MOFI is at something like N20 million as the asset size and we are conducting a re-evaluation. By the time we finish the re-evaluation, the value of the Nigerian Railway Corporations will run into trillions. Also, by the time we finish the re-evaluation of our airports, it will run into trillions” she stated.
Explaining how the re-engineering will happen, she said: “There is a process that is on going. We’ll have MOFI fully set up a world class investment company with a new management and a new board to move from the civil service structure where it sits as a unit under the office of the Accountant General of the Federation, and get core professionals that are really focused and specialised in portfolio management and driving investments to run better” she said.
