2025 budget: Our ambitious posture challenges all to unleash potentials — Presidency

World Bank’s description of the 2025 budget for Nigeria as being ambitious is in order and does not in any way diminish the fact that growth and development are being recorded.

Special Adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Economic Affairs, Dr Tope Fasua, said globally, every budget is a dream intended to drive the process to unleash the potential of a people.

Fusua said this on Wednesday while responding to questions on the Morning Show on Arise TV.

He said, while Nigeria is open to the counsel by the World Bank that it should double its performance five times to build a $1 trillion economy, Fasua said, Nigeria has the right to be ambitious to realise its intended goal, as it remains focused on doing so.

“Look, it is left to us to be ambitious. This is our country. Nobody should be more ambitious for this country than we Nigerians.

“We know where we are coming from. We know where we want to head.

We know where we are presently, the budget is actually about a projection into the future. It’s a dream.

“And the budget is used to challenge the people to work harder and work faster.”

Fasua said that “the key issue in that budget is whether we can hold crude oil prices at $75? Can we produce 2 million barrels a day? We can produce 2 million barrels a day, but it takes time. It takes a bit of time, a few months.

He said he heard the NNPCL boss speaking of possible expansion of the company’s operation to increase production, and this speaks to the right ambition of the nation as it challenges its human capital to action towards the desired national goal of a boasted economy.

“I mean, yesterday I saw in the news where Mr. Ojulari of NNPCL was saying that we are going back to Kolemani, to some of those, you know, hydrocarbon deposits in the north, in Gombe State, in the Maiduguri area. We do have crude oil in those areas.

“So we have crude oil in those areas. If we can get 100,000 or 200,000 barrels in those areas, that adds to the 1.6mbpd, 1.7mbpd we are doing. That’s equal to 1.8mbpd

“In the south, in the delta region, onshore, we have indeed perhaps hundreds of abandoned wells, which producers are going back to.

“And then we also have new development and new investment. As one of them, Green Energy International, they have invested about $400 million in building a new platform and also an offshore platform for loading, spending so much money, perhaps the biggest kind of investment we have seen since LNG over 20 years ago.

“And so they are also looking at adding about 100,000 bpd to, you know, on their own terminal, and even new blends of crude oil are coming up.

You know, there are new blends coming up now, you know, so to add all these to the pool that we have would take us there.

He argued that if the country could produce over 2m bpd in the 1970s, how much more now that the country has access to more data, technology, and manpower for the same exploration as well as more fields to explore.

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