 The 2022 budget of economic growth and sustainability has a projected capital expenditure of $5.35 trillion, a non-debt recurring spending of $6.8 trillion, and debt servicing projected to cost $3.61 trillion. With crude oil averaging $67 a barrel this year, the oil price benchmark for 2022 has been set at $57 per barrel with an oil production estimate of 1.88 million barrels per day. The budget proposal is based on an exchange rate of $410.15 to the dollar and projected GDP growth of 4.2% while the inflation rate is 13%. But there is a proposed budget deficit of $6.26 trillion. We plan to finance the deficit mainly by new borrowings, totaling $5.01 trillion, $90.7 billion for privatisation proceeds. President Buhari sought to alleviate fears over Niger's growing debt. Some have expressed concern over our resort to borrow and to finance our fiscal gaps. They are right to be concerned. However, we believe that the debt level of the federal government is still within sustainable limits. Borrowing at specific strategic projects and can be verified publicly. But a sustainability consultant would like the government to look inwards in funding the budget deficit. Currently MDAs as well as international oil companies and other very important organisations across the country, they refuse to remit certain funds within their disposal to the federal government. And we know that this fund runs into trillion of Naira. So I think if the president can actually focus on getting these MDAs and IOCs and other relevant organisations to do the remittance they need to do in respect to their taxes and other obligations to the federal government, maybe we'll just be able to generate just enough money to be able to shove the issue of borrowing to the ground. With the early presentation of the 2022 Appropriation Bail and All Things Benecore, Nigeria could well be on track for a budget cycle of 12 calendar months from January to December. Merci beaucoup for Plus TV Africa. Just a quick report there by Merci, a book of Plus TV Africa. And now we are going to be speaking with Femi Egbeshala, the president, association of small business owners of Nigeria. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Three points. Mr Egbeshala, can you hear us? Yes, good morning and thanks for having me. Great to have you on the breakfast this morning. And I'm going to start with asking, you know, you know, basic thoughts on the president's budget yesterday, 16.39 trillion Naira. There have been people who have screamed, you know, at those figures, seeing where we're coming from. In the year 2000, our budget wasn't, you know, more up to 700 billion Naira. We've moved from there to, you know, asking for about 16.39 trillion Naira in 2022. So let me, first of all, get your thoughts from yesterday's address to the Joint Administration of National Assembly. Well, the increase in the budget to 16.39 trillion is an indication that the government is going to have more money to bomb different ministries, agencies and Naira status. And that will also mean more development for the country, as it may be. And that's what we need for now. The inflation rate is so high that we need so much fund to be able to tackle inflation and bring back the economy to what it used to be. But the challenge there now is how do we fund this? Do we have that kind of fund? And we actually generate the expected revenue at the winter post. But must we continue to borrow to support our budgets? That's the concern. Naturally, one would have expected that the budget should be based on the national revenue, rather than going ahead to fund it from borrowed money overseas. And it means that the government also need to begin to look inward and see how they can work more on local national revenue generation, such that our budget will be based on what we can have and not we can borrow from. Well, it also shows that there's a problem with the system and the economy, because if you are spending more than what you can generate, it means there are leakages somewhere. It means they are setting challenges somewhere. It means that there is need for us to increase our productivity. That being said, the government needs to be more innovative in generating revenue, such that our budget will be dependent on what we can raise, and this budget will be prudently spent on the proposals. For example, in Nigeria today, we have a lot of policy pronouncements, but the implementation has always been a challenge. The question is, this year's Budget 2021, how has the implementation rate been, what are the reviews of this year's budget to show the challenges we have had, what areas we have deviated from the proposals that were submitted last year, and how can we correct it? These are the things we need to do next. Okay, so I'm going to go next to one of the things that you mentioned, and that is budget implementation. We don't have enough of that conversation. We also have an auditor general who doesn't really do justice with helping to explain to Nigerians, and of course the presidency to explain to Nigerians how well we've used the funds that were budgeted and those that were borrowed and whatnot. It's always easy when the president puts out those speeches saying, you can see that roads were built, you can see trains were built, this and that, but there's no proper detail as to how proper the budget was implemented. So let's get your thoughts on that one. Does that just make us seem to be moving blindly and continue borrowing? It seems more like that. I think the government of the day needs to be more proactive about implementation and reviews. We need to have a stronger economic team, and we also need to have perhaps another team that monitors the implementation of the projects so that such that we are in tandem with what we are expected to do with taxpayer money. Given that we can also have challenges at times like this particular year last year, we know that the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic actually disrupted the projects to a very large extent, but be that as it may, we should at all times continue to focus on the implementation of what we have. And this time, I think most funds should go into sustaining the economy and growing the economy instead of servicing the recurrence. And that has always been another challenge with our budgets over time. We need to focus on growing the industries in the country such that they can be more productive and we can get more revenue from them. We need not to focus more on oil as we have always done. Like in this budget also, the focus is more on oil. We are expecting most of the revenue to come from the oil sector, which to me is not in tandem with the realities of today's world. We need to focus more on growing the SMEs. We need to focus more on growing scale acquisitions so that we can have more opportunities in the country. We need to focus more on the health sector so that most of our funds will not be going overseas in the name of going for treatment overseas and that may have become stricken to the more. We need to focus more on developing our raw materials. We have a lot of raw materials, raw minerals in the country that are unexplored and can give us a lot of revenues if government actually focus more than they are doing at the moment on this. We also need to focus on education. We cannot really get much without actually paying more attention on education. Education has always been one of the best growth of any economy. If we are fully budgeting enough into the education sector, you will discover that there are going to be more innovation and we will be innovative ideas. We will be able to create a better economy for ourselves that will not longer be dependent on getting fund from overseas and we will be able to also reduce our imports. The import into this country has been challenging and has been threatening in our era and as long as it continues to do that, inflation will continue to rise and government will always need more money to fight inflation by increasing their projects year by year and that's not the way to go. So for us to be able to tackle inflation effectively and efficiently, we need to make sure that Nigerians bring to understand that local meat products and services is the way to go. We must encourage the production and perpetuate of locally made products and services and this has to start with government itself. But we need to begin to see how they can be done in locally made products and services and be less dependent on the imported ones. We have quite a number of prohibited product lists by CBN but we need to go beyond that. One thing is to have some products being prohibited and another thing is to enforce the prohibition. Today we have a foreign rise all around us which is part of the prohibited list and many other products and even food items that are prohibited but are still in our market. What are they doing there? Who is enforcing these policies and what are they to be in a place where it should be and not the other way around whereby some of us will begin to disrupt the efficiency and effectiveness of the policy proposal and the implementation of the policy at the end of the day. Yeah. Ms. Aibashalad, these things, I'm sure that we could have had the same conversation in 2015 or in 2016 or 2017 because we've had similar, you know, these discussions and these plans and I'm sure experts have continued to say these things over the years. How much we need to focus on development, focus on industries, focus on science and technology, education, healthcare, basic infrastructure. Some of all these things that really would help the Nigerian economy grow but every year we see that there's an increment in the budget proposal. That means that these things aren't working and so we need to continue to source for more money. So I'm going to come back to that and get your views on how well we've done in that regard but I want you to share your views concerning those who are complaining that we are borrowing too much. We currently have a modern six trillion-hour deficit. We very likely will be borrowing about five trillion-hour plus. Do you have similar worries with former President Dullesh Agam and other experts who have said that this is really just leading us to a very, very terrible situation if we continue borrowing? Yes. I have heard Nigeria actually bothered about borrowing because it is going to have a direct negative influence on all of us at the end of the day. No individual, no business, no country who wants to borrow to finance is like expedition. That is not right and nobody would want to agree with that. I for one continue to wonder why we should keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing without working on how to increase our revenue. Granted, we have been reasonable for once but it should not be a custom that you have to go again and again and again. If you continue to spend more than what you can generate it means there is going to be a problem and eventually there will be a collapse and the government needs to understand that they need to learn from the other economies. We have bigger economies that are having more population than Nigeria and there are several other challenges but they are not borrowing. They have left to leave according to their means and also become innovative in generating revenue and that is the way to go. It is a lot of concern. We wonder what will happen next year again because the borrowing of this year will always be more than that of the other year and it is not good for the economic health. It means that the government also needs to check their economic team. I think it is time for us to begin to look at how to encourage the government to put more expats in the economy to see how steer the direction where the economy is going. We cannot continue to live on borrowing. It is like a blood. When blood is leaking from your system and it is not blocked on time, death is imminent and that is exactly what we foresee with this economy. It is an uncomfortable situation. I don't think there is a lack of expats in the country. There are persons like you and lots of people who understand the economy to perfection but unfortunately the presence in government don't seem to agree with your narrative or the narrative of some of these experts. I know you are not speaking for the government but why do you think that they understand it different because missile finance has made statements yesterday saying that we will continue to borrow to keep the country growing. Where do you think their own narrative comes from? Well, I think that there is a lot of difference between sitting on the tables and coming in policy and being on the streets. Many of the economists that are on the streets that are romancing with the public day by day and not unfortunately in the government, economic committees or tea. That is why some of us are clamoring that state holders of the road to fall be part of the economic team of the government. The so-called technocrats alone or government officials alone cannot sit in the office and think that all is well. All is not well. They don't really understand the happenings in the streets this time. It is very very difficult for an avid man to leave and even have three square meals a day and that is the challenge and that is why we have increased the number of advisers everywhere but it should not be named everywhere. It is about crimes and advisers because everybody must survive and when they cannot get good means of survival they look the other way around and why do they find it difficult to survive because the economy is so harsh inflationary rate is the highest at any point in time in our history and that is not good for us. If I were the president I would look into my economic team and perhaps make some critical changes to be able to effect the realities of the economies of today. We need not continue to borrow. We must be able to look in world. If organizations, companies in and around Nigeria are still weathering the storm, COVID-19 or not and they are still making profits declaring profits, why will a country be declaring deficits? That's not right and I do not agree that we must continue to borrow and borrow with the various potentials that this country has and the human capital too that we have that can harness these potentials to bring in even more than the double of the revenue that is being protected at this point. Great time to remind Nigerians that elections have consequences and it might take 80 years for every person to feel the effect of those consequences. I like that. I like that. I now want us to talk about the value of the Naira and what this continues borrowing, the effect that it will have. The CBN governor has continued to do all he can to help the exchange rate somehow, someway become more reasonable but these plans are not working very well and so it's borrowing as briefly as you can. Is borrowing also one of the reasons why we will continue to see the Naira's value depreciate? Of course, it also contributes directly to the precision of the Naira because when you continue to borrow to sustain your expenditure you will continue to live big and when you continue to live big it is the detriment of the Naira because every other person will believe there is money to spend and they don't now look at the money that is available, money that is ready to share from state to state, from local government to local government and everybody seems to be comfortable why the reality is different and that means that it is time now for government to see how they can strengthen the Naira not just by relying on the policies of CBN which has not been working as it should be over time the physical realities of the streets we need to look at how to strengthen our economy how to strengthen the small and medium enterprise sector how to strengthen the industries how to strengthen our duties to be productive such that we will be able to have more jobs created we will have more enterprise coming up and existing enterprises will be able to grow faster and bigger than they used to be will become less dependent on imports and this will eventually bring back our Naira to its lost glory if we reduce our import to the barest minimum naturally and ordinarily the dollar will begin to fall and Naira will continue to rise but if we continue to rely on policies on the table I'm sorry to say we will continue to have a long way to go but as these policies are taking with us for the past 3-4-5 years Naira has continued to enjoy a free fall and that means that something is wrong with those policies if we are not actually getting the desired result and that means we need to do something different to get a different result at this time we cannot continue to sit down and look like some people will say the budget is proposed on a of 4.10 Naira to a dollar but the reality is that the market the open market is not even 4.10 Naira meaning that we are not getting it wrong from the beginning and the only way to get it right is to be less dependent on imports and more so that we can strengthen our Naira the more Is the current oil price any form of comfort because we have an oil price benchmark of 57 but of course the oil price is currently around 80 and maybe even climbing Well yes the benchmark for this proposal is 57 dollars per barrel but the real market price is small and above that I love that the government has been very conservative the proposal at this time but some of us have lost confidence in the sales of crude oil to sustain our budgets some of us could believe again that we must continue to rely on oil is sold for economic and wrong we have gone past that the world is even looking at finding alternative means as source of energy rather than oil meaning that at the point in time there will be less and less demand for oil where would that place continue to put a primary reliance on oil and how much a barrel of oil is sold and it shows that we are still not looking in world enough so we believe that the the first price of 57 dollars per barrel should be realistic all things being equal because it is conservative enough but at the same time we need to look more beyond just the selling crude oil to maintain our economy for example government is looking at getting more oil waste because of how it is actually drying up but is that the way to go to continue to pump our money to discover and explore oil waste I think that's not the way to go the command is to focus on the non oil products the domestic products and see how they can encourage these domestic products to grow rather than more for us more attention on our sales of crude oil and its exploration Femi Egbershala you are president association of small business owners of Nigeria you are going to bring you in with that you earlier spoke about how we haven't done well enough in investing in numerous other sectors how important that we need to focus on other sectors like the agriculture sector industries science and technology small businesses SMEs across the country education healthcare and all of that so I want you to share your views on how you think that better investment in small businesses will be able to help Nigerian and also look at the way that the current government has also positioned itself people have said that they have continued to stifle businesses earlier this morning we spoke about how electricity prices have also been hiked secretly without Nigerians knowing so do you think that the current government even if they continue to say that they always have these great speeches that they make but do you think that they've done well enough with regards opening up the space for small businesses to thrive in Nigeria well the end result should be a determinants that should answer that question and the end result is is the SME space growing and we have been more enterprise the enterprises that are existing are growing are they transforming from micro to small to medium from medium to large enterprise the answer is no and why is this because the economic realities is so hard and not conducive for growth and what makes it so hard because a lot of infrastructure deficits is in the country and it becomes very very difficult for startups or small medium enterprises to grow we have a situation where instead of recording growth we are recording deaths many companies now many small businesses at a point of death are already dead what's the reason for this governments will give a support of perhaps 10 cents and create a situation that will take about 30 percent out of them granted government has done a lot of intervention in recent times quite a number of intervention but the question is how many benefited from this intervention according to this report we have about 47 million entrepreneurs in the country at the moment and I'm sure that is far more than that the realities of today show that we have more than even 50, 60 million entrepreneurs this intervention how many of these entrepreneurs benefited from it can it even get up to 1, 2 million entrepreneurs if it gets to 1 million what's the percentage of 1 million compared to 47 million that means a lot still needs to be done there's a lot of gap that needs to be covered and this will field if we really want entrepreneurs small-medium businesses to grow in this country but virtually all the sectors are hailing look at the agricultural sector we have a lot of food wasting away while we continue to import products that are made from exported food here while I want raw material that will be wasted away government needs to break that link government needs to encourage and be cultured but they still need to do more to integrate access road from the rural areas to the cities of the town such that these farm produce can move efficiently to the cities where to be bought and consumed government needs to also support the real farmers you will discover that many of these incentives are going to political farmers and not the real farmers and that's why the real farmers are still doing it the local good way that they are working government needs to have been able to lift them from that the good method of farming to make a nice farming that is the order of today that will increase productivity while we continue to buy beans that we can plant here as much as $100,000 up a bag that's silly and it means that something is wrong somewhere why would we plant our rice here harvest it and before we can sell it we have to rebuy it put it back with a third lane in Thailand it means something is wrong something is wrong government has done a little but they need to do more and the only way they can actually do more is to engage stakeholders as I said earlier time they cannot sit in the office and know where the truth which is on the streets they need to involve people who are actually stakeholders who knows the nature of what is happening to the economy and to the business and bring them abroad to also bring up the suggestions that are there to be part of the policy that government will come up with and also supports them in the implementation of these policies that's the only way we can get it right the education sector is another bad sector that we can talk about but our school time look at the Calvary public primary schools secondary schools you will discover that those students coming out of there must have been geniuses to be able to come out with good breaks look at our graduates what is the quality of education they've been able to receive and many of them are unemployable because the quality of education is becoming low and falling every day we will continue to talk on and on and on but for me the permanent one because I belong to the business sector is for government this time to pay more attention on developing the SME space why do we need to do this because the jobs are no longer there these jobs are no longer there for our graduates and our Nigerian youth the way we can have jobs now is to grow the enterprise space so that those entrepreneurs can involve young people and other youth can also embrace entrepreneurship and come to employ others government actually have no job creating jobs which is the duty of the entrepreneur to create jobs and they can only create jobs if the environment is enabling well you know an enabling environment is it cannot be overemphasized how important it is and that includes also the challenges that we've had with security the challenges we've also had with electricity and basically these little new laws here and there that stifle businesses that's why you also see a lot of young people moving on to social media to be the medium of trade because they can't afford to do business the regular way Miss Agbashala quickly also because we're going to wrap up in a bit on your views on revenue over time and how important it is that we should somehow some way be able to improve on Nigeria's revenue we are going to be looking for 5 trillion naira to borrow we currently cannot find 6 trillion naira to complete our budget it means that Nigeria is not making enough money do you think that the minister of finance and the Nigerian government currently understands the need for us to improve on the revenue as a country in order to stop borrowing well to like I did say results are actually generated from what you can see not just on paper work the realities of we can see everyone of us can see shows that they are not cutting it really right and then I wonder if they realize that but if they don't realize this I'm proud that maybe one of the reasons we have seen where we are today we need to change our ways of doing things so that we can get different results we cannot just continue this way the economy is collapsing every day but we have many ways to raise revenue many people are not in the tax net in fact those people paying tax nets but how do you bring somebody in the tax net who has not been able to eat 3 square meals a day so for you to be able to actually bring people to the tax net government must also show that they are responsible people must see the citizens must see that government is actually working to improve their welfare and their well-being when that is not done it will be difficult to bring them to the tax net imagine the price of diesel has gone up electricity has gone up so many other prices has gone up dollar is rising it means that the products and services will also have a higher price tag and when they have a higher price tag we are going to consume these things it still goes down to the issue of the citizens the citizens are the consumers do they have that purchasing power to buy these products again even if they must buy and talk because they are necessities they have to reduce their buying because their purchasing power has reduced when do you have an economy like that it is difficult for government to actually enforce tax on its citizens but that's the way to go every state client gets their money primarily from tax and other innovative ideas so government should continue to think of how to improve on infrastructure on our health system on youth development on industrializing the country so that's such that they will have more people to tax and more revenue will come from taxation another area that remains untapped today is this issue of relying, processing and adding value to our products from agriculture to raw materials to look at the main products we need to add value to them we have countries team today Keter and Kasaba that has always been exported either by crude or other way around and they bring brought here in the name of process tax and the rest and we are still buying it if we continue to do that we have nowhere to go Nigerians too need to change their mindsets but as much as government has their own challenges we also need to change their mindsets we cannot continue to export our job opportunities to export our future to other countries and the detriment of our youth of our coming generation we need to change their mindsets and products and services so that we can also grow our economy if the government does not get it right we are the one that suffers in the most not those government officials so we also need to begin to see how we are safe and good to the economy how we are safe from the little money we are getting can see a certain form of access to government to improve the economy how we are safe can use that power that we have to force to change the bad government to a good government not because we are giving some stipend for that reason who are going to be the highest bidder that should not be the case this time we need to be looking in more and see how we can better the amount of access by ourselves Nigeria is for us and we are the only one that can make it better if a bad government is there it is only good to be there for a period of 4 or maximum of 8 years our destiny is in our hands we need to work on improving our laws it starts from our own community and we see how we can get our services and improve our community we need to wait endlessly for government to come and do everything for us if we improve our community the economic situation of our community will also improve we will be able to do more enterprise and we have money to do other things and even pay tax and support our young ones in Nigeria such that they will not embrace crime that is the way to do so it is an all inclusive thing if we must get it right absolutely and final question about debt forgiveness as he mentioned a few weeks ago while he continues to borrow I did update that right I'm asking can the president continue to you know mention debt forgiveness while he continues to borrow there are two opposite things there are two opposite things if let's bring it down to a common man's understanding if you borrow money from me you are telling me to forgive you and cancel your debts I am coming back to borrow the money it means that you are not getting it right you will forgive somebody who is repentant and who is ready to change his way of life he is proud of doing things so if you are begging for forgiveness and you are seeing borrowing it means you are not changing your way of doing things and our forgiveness will also encourage you to even borrow the money so naturally even borrowing the money is not the way to go the way to go is if we must go for forgiveness go for debt cancellation we need to also stop borrowing that will show to the forgiver that actually this country this government has such a situation that we are doing things and I ready now to work on getting things done the right way and that's what we need to do at this time we must be self-dependent we must be self-dependent as a sovereign state individual states of the country we must be self-dependent as a local government we must be self-dependent as even individuals that's the way to go and government is at the forefront they need to work by example so that we also can follow their example in making all ourselves self-dependent government should please and please and please work on raising the idea of borrowing to support our budgets our existence and sovereignty alright I truly enjoyed this conversation thank you very much for joining us and spending time with us on the breakfast this morning we wish you a very beautiful weekend ahead thank you so much too so much too for the opportunity it's a privilege stay with us we'll take a short break when we come back we are moving to the southeast we'll talk about the possibility and the idea of a state of emergency in Anambra state as we move closer to the elections on the 6th of November stay with us here on the breakfast