 Now good afternoon. I think what has happened while I was governor is now in the past and I like to look more forward than backwards but I like to say first that there's a lot of money out there especially on the African continent in the informal sector. There's a lot of money there money that hasn't come into recognition and we must find a way a way to bring that money into recognition and we must then design a developmental business I like to call it infrastructure power water the businesses and capital will follow them if the business model is clear if the returns are good and we have seen that in some sense in the telecoms that said what we now deal with on a national scale is that we're trying to move our economy from dependence on oil to opening up other sectors and the the foundation for doing that is to build our infrastructure so the government in which I now serve under President Buhari is focused on national infrastructure building the responsibility of my ministry are interstate routes routes that connect all of the 36 states of Nigeria to one another and rail rail is under my colleague in transportation so is airports so my core function as far as our transportation is concerned is to build the national highway and I like to connect this very quickly to the problem of urbanization typified by housing pressures you may have heard some numbers which I continuously insist I will not repeat about the deficits of housing in my country and the thing to note is to ask first where is that pressure most felt there is no dispute that there are pressures for housing but are those numbers true I argue they are not I argue they are not empirical I argue that there is no data behind them and one of the reasons I do so is that there is no pressure for housing supply in the rural areas there's no pressure there and even in the urban centers there is no city in Nigeria no state rather in Nigeria that I haven't traveled and in most of the cities I visit they the scores of empty houses and does this deficit reportedly then take into account these empty houses but I think one thing to agree upon is that there's congestion and we all know that and that is why Ricky and his colleagues are doing this brilliant work how to make cities livable and perhaps the solution is not necessarily building more houses alone building more houses might help but is not is not the silver bullet and the experience we are having now in Nigeria as we are building roads across the country what I see is that people are going back to the land and this is a mixture of infrastructure building and agric I can tell you that farmers who used to lease their land in order to raise some capital and come into cities to come and trade have gone back to their land and there are over 6.3 million of them now farming rice our rice imports have dropped from night by 90 percent we used to import five million dollars worth of rice daily that has reduced to just about 10 percent simply because the president is determined to deliver on diversification agriculture provides that opportunity to take work and opportunities back into the rural areas but the experience I have with rural people when we are constructing is quite revealing they constitute the bull work not only of the labor but also of the entire supply chain transport and particularly mining laterite stones granite and all of the ingredients that we need to construct so there this is happening on a scale that perhaps last happened after our civil war in the 70s of course the argument will be made you can't build forever I agree but we are developing also a national maintenance framework because those roads have to be maintained buildings have to be maintained and if you look at the number of people that maintenance really employs it's about 70 percent of the entire built faculty design and construction takes only about 30 percent combined so this is the future that I see and in in then addressing the congestion in cities this is one solution that I think that all planners all developers all heads of municipal governments should think of what is the economic activity in the sub-overn and the rural areas that we we can deal with and I think that it is interesting that we can learn from private entrepreneurs there's a lesson there that we can learn all of the big brands and I'm not going to mention any brand retail outlets always invariably after establishing their footprints in the city always go to the rural areas there's one E3 a brand a coffee brand and some of the and I think they're useful models within which to go how are we funding this as you might all know oil prices have left those heated days of a hundred dollars per barrel so it's a mixture of taxation the federal internal revenue service is increasing the number of people on this database and that number has grown I think as a last week to 33 million people who now are on that database similar to what happened back then in Lagos it was 500 000 people who were paying taxes in 2007 and it was 5 million 4.5 million in 2015 when I left and I show those numbers are raising essentially a lot of people out of the tax net and this is the way to go interestingly the the taxes due to the federal government are quite different from those due to the subnational governments these are corporate taxes and other heads of taxes but that is happening and we are of course also borrowing now that that is where the politics come in opposition says we are mortgaging the future by borrowing yet the complaint that the infrastructure needs to be fixed and the argument is we are borrowing to invest we are not borrowing to consume and the investments will lead to productive activity that would make our debt payment obligations sustainable over the long term one of the interesting acts of borrowing was our resort to islamic funding a Sukuk we borrowed 100 billion Naira and there was outcry that the president and our government was trying to islamize the nation but in the event when we responded to that outcry and made the argument that the 100 billion had actually been divided into six equal parts for the six geopolitical zones and we were applied to the roads within each geopolitical zone that were in our remit and I remember I made the point that any zone that does not want islamic money should tell us to move its own to another zone that needed it the argument ended but those challenges will be there and it is for those who have the responsibility to pretend public affairs to continue to be clear in their thinking and the choices that they are making our debt financing is still high but without the investment in infrastructure you won't get better because our productivity and our competitiveness will not improve without the infrastructure the other way we have been able to finance some of this infrastructure was to leverage on a previous policy of the preceding government which is called a tax credit advance an executive order issued by government and it was targeted at the income tax of companies and there was a provision that if any private organization built public infrastructure that members of the public could ordinarily access then he with his own monies he would be entitled to recoup it back from his identifiable tax obligation over a period of time and that has helped us to deal with very very big projects a bridge across the rainforest area of the Niger Delta across the Atlantic it takes about almost a whole day really to traverse by by by boats and it then means that a bottle of water on the mainland is half the price when it gets to the island and you could actually travel that bridge in less than 10 minutes so that bridge is now under construction we had the Nigerian energy company putting up half of the money in the anticipation that they will claw back from the attacks you might also be aware that there's currently a gridlock in Lagos as a result of the pressure on the ports and the roads again we've been able to raise about 72 billion to finance the construction of the road which is in some state of disrepair so they and we now have a couple of companies one of the things we did was to modify the existing order because it did not allow for clusters of people to come together so it only applied to people who had enough profit after tax to be able to fund infrastructure but we now have groups of companies who say look we want to deal with our industrial roads in order to be able to move goods quickly can we partner together so we've made that recommendation to the president he has approved the amendment so that clusters of companies can come together so it's a tax advance government is taking his tax ahead and putting it in infrastructure to help to help business develop you will see perhaps that I did not dwell on housing because in my country is largely a municipal problem because the sub-national governments own the land but even at that government at the federal level is intervening and what we're doing is trying to develop a pilot housing program we see that the needs of the people across regions across cultures and across faiths are quite diverse and it is presumed to prescribe a particular type of housing a previous national housing program in the 70s suffered this problem of acceptability until today those houses are there in some parts of the country unoccupied in some parts of the country they're fully in use so we've done a survey and we found out that Nigerians necessarily do not mind living in one two or three bedroom housing but how you build them is particularly defining in the northern part of the country they like them as bungalows with courtyards and responding to their land use land use types and their cultural dispositions and in the south of the country they don't mind blocks of flats and condos and this is what we are replicating now in 34 states the objective is to use this as a proof of concept and to validate what works where and then to ramp that up to scale so for us the issues first of acceptability as I said in our informal discussions I don't think and I say this from some of the experience I've had that Nigerians want to live in houses made of timber it is acceptable in some other cultures culturally there hasn't been that transition yet it may yet happen it may yet happen in a few years time but it's largely brick and mortar type that they're they're predisposed to we are looking at getting ahead in terms of recapitalizing the federal mortgage bank to which workers in the country subscribed and we're trying to open the pool of resources to people in the informal sector because currently the contributors to the federal mortgage bank under the national housing scheme are mainly people in in in government and there is a potential for a lot of capital to come in there I think that really is is it my concept paper asked me to speak about areas of new investment and I will close there by saying that we are currently developing many grids as the one of the quickest way to address our access to power issues while also strengthening the on grid infrastructure to deliver more power we also need to quickly meter close to three million people so there's an opportunity there for meter manufacturing for meter installations and supplies there is a regulation now that allows entrepreneurs to come in get licenses and work with the distribution companies and as I said maintenance is a new field that will break perhaps in the first quarter of next year when the framework is established and we're looking to maintenance of government schools government offices hospitals prisons courthouses as the first model we will get on to more specific maintenance of power transformation soft stations and so on and roads as we go and those models will will evolve in the fullness of time so I think those are the the helicopter view if you like of the issues I have been asked to address and my time is now up thank you very much just before we go to Jennifer your opening remark is something that has been left there very very important which is that there's a lot of money out there particularly in the informal sector and we need to do something about that or get access to it give us two sentences on that then we'll go back as we talk about what what what's your thinking on that commissioned a study working with uh henando de soto when I was governor and the results showed that barely 30 percent of the capital that was available in my state was in recognizable form and it also showed that that was prevalent across the whole of Africa some had only a recognition for 20 some had a recognition for 40 some but nobody had even 50 percent but the and these are the small and medium business businesses that we often talk about artisans and all of that but they are not in the in the in the in the financial framework where their money plays a huge part so they can't even access credit because they are not documented but they have their own documents in their own cooperatives in their own loose unions they keep records and how to create the synergy between these two uh financial blocks that exist within most of the continent uh is perhaps one way to unlock uh and bring capital into the way that we perhaps are are more used to dealing with it money in the banking sector that we can identify and stratify