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Nigeria says global oil prices drop not to derail 2016 budget

Xinhua, February 3, 2016 Adjust font size:

The current drop and vagaries in global oil prices will not derail Nigeria's 2016 budget, authorities said Tuesday.

Although the situation has caused Nigeria's oil revenue to drop, recording a total loss of 143.9 million U.S. dollars in oil revenue last December, Minister of Budget and National Planning Udoma Udo Udoma said ongoing government reforms, targeted at diversifying the country's revenue base away from single oil commodity, will make the 30.3 billion U.S. dollars national budget achievable.

"Our oil minister is assiduously applying innovative financing in his oil sector to address any likely revenue gap from our projected or anticipated 820 billion naira (an estimated 4.14 billion USD) from oil," Udoma said at a meeting with a top delegation of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Abuja.

He said some of the ongoing reforms of government to cushion the blow dealt by oil revenue drop include the plugging of leakages through zero tolerance for political corruption, and application of sound public financial collection system which can provide a wide coverage for valued-added tax and other tax collection.

Nigeria has been unable to increase its oil exports due to the negative impact of declining crude oil prices at the global market.

Apart from the drop in international oil price, challenges, such as depreciation of the local currency, infrastructure decay, substantial monies looted from the treasury, are plaguing Nigeria's economy.

Udoma said it is in the light of this that the country would be counting on assistance from development partners such as the AfDB to access 9.02 billion USD loan needed for its infrastructural development. Endit