The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has charged federal and state governments, in the country, to create an asset register that provides detailed information about the nation’s assets at national, state, and local government levels.
This, the chamber argued, had become imperative to further boost revenue generation and enhance foreign exchange inflows into the country.
In a statement issued, on Sunday, and signed by its newly-appointed Director-General, Dr Chinyere Almona, the chamber expressed dissatisfaction that the government had continued to resort to debt to finance recurrent and capital obligations in the face of dwindling revenue, despite the country being asset-rich.
The chamber also expressed regrets that despite owning a lot of assets, such assets contribute very little to the country’s fiscal and financial situation; since their market values remain unknown.
“There is, therefore, a need for government to take urgent steps to establish the market values of the assets, securitise the corporate assets and commercialise the real estate assets to raise revenue for the government and foreign exchange inflows for the country,” it advised.
According to the business advocacy group, the corporate assets should be securitized via public share issuance to raise equities, using Saudi Aramco’s IPO of 2019, where $25.6 billion was raised after the oil firm sold a 1.5 per cent stake to private investors, thereby establishing the value of Aramco to be over $2 trillion, as a model.
It also counselled the federal and state governments to repurpose and redevelop their idle or under-utilised physical properties for commercialisation to generate revenue.
“Typical examples are what the United Kingdom has done with its inner-city prisons as well as the United States’ conversion of military bases into great commercial places through the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) and has created a separate agency to manage its thousands of real estate portfolios,” the chamber stated.
The group also called for the liberalisation of the infrastructure sector, such as railway, pipelines, power transmission and others, to enable investors to commit equity funds into such business concerns.
The Chamber stressed the need for massive investment in skill and talent development to increase the pool of the country’s human capital, adding that the financialisation of Nigeria’s human assets would go a long way in boosting net foreign income and remittance inflows into the economy.
It, however, clarified that the recommendations should not be taken to mean advocacy for the sale of national assets, but a mechanism to generate more revenue from the assets without their outright sales.
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