Nigeria Sovereign Wealth Fund
In the years preceding 2008, Nigeria benefitted from the surge in oil prices, which allowed the government to build up excess reserves and increase public expenditure. However, Usman had identified that oil price volatility posed very high risks to growth in Nigeria’s oil-dependent economy, and as such pushed for the establishment of a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which will serve as a long-term saving fund for future generations and also as a development fund for socio-economic projects It was planned to be similar to the Government Pension Fund of Norway. Normally, excess revenue (i.e. actual revenue less budgeted revenue) was saved in the excess crude account, to prevent overheating the economy, though as there is no legal arrangement for the management of the excess crude account, and no mandate for it to be used as a future generations fund, a Sovereign Wealth Fund was necessary to enhance efficiency in the management of the country’s reserves. Usman constituted a Presidential Technical Committee on the Establishment of the Nigeria Sovereign Wealth Fund, which submitted its report to the National Economic Council and the President. However, due to Usman’s redeployment to the Ministry of National Planning, efforts to establish the Sovereign Wealth Fund have been put on hold.
Read more about this topic: Shamsuddeen Usman
Famous quotes containing the words sovereign, wealth and/or fund:
“If a Sovereign should, by great accident, deviate into moderation, justice, and clemency, what a contemptible figure would he make in the catalogue of Princes!”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“I am advised that there is an unexpended balance of about $45,000 of the fund appropriated for the relief of the sufferers by flood upon the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and I recommend that authority be given to use this fund to meet the most urgent necessities of the poorer people in Oklahoma.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)