The Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Atiku Bagudu, has revealed that the Federal Government was liaising with other countries to provide remote work opportunities for Nigerian youths.
Bagudu said this on Monday at the KPMG budget 2025 day aired on Arise TV.
Nigeria is home to one of Africa’s largest youth populations, even as the National Bureau of Statistics said that the country’s unemployment rate dropped to 4.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2024 from 5.3 per cent in Q1. The Nigeria Labour Force Survey indicated that the labour force participation rate among the working-age population increased to 79.5 per cent in Q2 2024 from 77.3 per cent in Q1 2024.
Bagudu, who noted that this was the first full-year budget after the total deregulation of petroleum prices and the deregulation of the foreign exchange market, in addition to the reduction in electricity subsidy by creating tariff categories, pointed out that the economy was moving in the right direction.
Responding to the question of human capital development and budgetary allocations to education and likely defaults in the student loan scheme, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, Bagudu said, “I think for us the big story is that the economy is headed in the right direction. And once it is headed in the right direction, what is important is actions to do so. When public investment is made to support education and skill in an economy that is facing in the right direction, then the private sector can even be more confident that there’s a skill set in the country that can support private investment. And it makes sense. It’s mutually profitable.
“So, both the NELFUND and the increase in spending on education are designed to support that. Equally, we are engaging with many countries in order to see how legitimately our young ones can provide outsourcing services from where they are and can participate in business processing.”
I was in Enugu about a month ago, where I visited the European Business Park supported by the Australian Development Corporation. And young men and women are providing services from Enugu to companies in Europe. We are talking to a number of countries. My ministry is leading that because we are responsible for development cooperation. The current country director of the World Bank was coming from the Philippines, where he helped create over 1.5 million jobs for young men and women in the Philippines, providing services to companies from the Philippines. We are engaging him to share that experience. The Ministry of Digital Economy is currently in the process of training three million Nigerians in technology jobs.”
He added that there is a fund for training and already demand for talents from other countries.
“We have seen demand for software engineers from different countries. The Japanese ambassador told me that Nigeria is the first call for Japanese companies now seeking software engineers. So, this investment, yes, there might be some risk. Somebody who took a loan may be challenged even in a normal market. We have seen the student loan market in the United States, which is more advanced than ours. Sometimes, the government may even need to intervene. But I think for Nigerians, I believe that is a desirable programme to the extent that even if circumstances demand that those beneficiaries are supported by a reduction, I’m sure Nigerians will welcome it,” the minister added.
Bagudu added that sustaining the positive economic momentum could have an impact on debt servicing, which has been a grief point for many analysts.
He said, “On the deficit of N14tn given what we saw in the innovative approaches to financing, first, because you don’t have recourse to the central bank of Nigeria at all. So, under no circumstance would the Central Bank be going above the legal limit of five per cent. So, we are going to market, and we are going to market in different ways. Innovative financing and innovative approaches: the local bonds have been issued where governments have raised money. This, of course, represents a statement of intention, just to ensure that those whom we have borrowed from will be confident that we will have enough to meet our debt service obligation. But if, as we anticipate, economic conditions will continue to improve, we may not need to spend up to that in debt service.”
In the agriculture sector, Bagudu said that the investor engagements by the FG were yielding fruit.
He said, “The new top agenda is agriculture and food security. The thought process is that agriculture is a key to poverty reduction; it’s a key to uplifting people out of poverty; it’s a key to reducing inflation as well as our desire to achieve a higher level of inclusive growth because it has the capability of mobilising more people or supporting more people to do more. And what we saw in the last few months was a strong bumper harvest in many states occasioned by increased security, weather conditions, and increased activity by those in the agricultural space, which is already impacting the prices of food items.
“It gives further impetus to do more in agriculture so that we maintain the trajectory of moving, modernising our agricultural production from the artisanal level to the livestock sector to the fisheries sector so that we can get yields to be higher, because, with improved yields, our people engaged in agriculture become wealthier, which is a driver of wealth creation. Thus, more money, N1.5tn, has been put into the budget to (re)capitalise the Bank of Agriculture. And it is anticipated that with that recapitalisation, the challenge we are seeing in funding agriculture by mainstream banks will be compensated for.”
He also pointed out that investors from Brazil and Saudi Arabia have taken an interest in the Nigerian agricultural sector.
Speaking on the budget, the partner at KPMG, Wole Adelokun, posited that the pegging of the naira at 1500/dollar in the 2025 budget was realistic given the trend in the market but that it was exposed to risks.
Adelokun listed three solutions to battle these risks and ensure the stability of the naira. They include “strategic direction to sustain confidence in the market, an import-substitution strategy, and a targeted approach to attract foreign direct investment, which has been weak.”
The Chief Executive of CFG Advisory, Tilewa Adebajo, in his comment, said that price discovery was the one thing left to be achieved in the foreign exchange market to ensure the stability of the naira.
