Armstrong Takang, the Managing Director/CEO of the Ministry Of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) has said that the N100 million naira preparation fund set up by the institution was prepared in a bid to attract investments into different sectors in Nigeria.
The MOFI MD said this in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Wednesday, where he spoke about the conference that was held by the ministry of Finance on Tuesday to reveal MOFI’s new mandate.
Speaking on the recently launched fund, Takang said that the 100 billion project preparation fund was created to help to build industries and different sectors in the country so as to attract investments, as investors will not invest in a sector or project if there are no bankable projects ongoing in that sector, or the project idea is not ready for investment.
He said, “That was a gap, and it still is in our market as far as attracting investments is concerned, and that was why the board of MOFI made a decision that we will set up this fund to finance that option work to develop a pipeline of bankable projects which will in turn attract investment into the different sectors of the economy.”
On the restructuring of the institution, Takang said, “Until last year, MOFI existed as a non-operating entity. What it meant was that many of the investments we made were not made from a strategic standpoint, and we didn’t have a framework and a governance structure that guided how they were managed, how they were monitored, to ensure that value was not only created, but it will be delivered to the benefits of Nigerians.”
The CEO then revealed that the government made a critical decision in the last year to restructure and reposition MOFI to become the trusted custodian and acting manager of the FGs holdings in investments, assets, and other resources.
“Part of that restructuring involved establishing a governing council, and that governing council is chaired by Mr. President with the vice president as the alternate chair, with the honourable minister of finance and the coordinating minister of the economy as the deputy chair,” he said.
Takang then said, “The mandate of the new MOFI is to ensure that every asset that Federal Government holds must deliver value to Nigerian and to Nigerians, and we need to make sure that that value is commercial in nature. So, if there is anything that is not commercial, we will stay away from it, because we believe that the value will contribute towards expanding the fiscal space, so that government will have a lot more resources to deploy in other priority sectors of the economy.”
He asserted that the position of custodian of assets held by the FG comes with the responsibility for the commonwealth of over 220 million Nigerians. He then said that it also comes with the need for transparency and accountability, which was one of the objectives at the conference that was held.
He said, “We strongly believe that the key success factor for our mandate is transparency and accountability, and that was one of the major reasons we had that conference yesterday, to render account to Nigerians.”
Speaking on MOFI’s new strategies, he said, “At the heart of MOFIs mandate is to establish what we own through a national assets register. That work has already commenced, and we have a list of most of the corporate assets that government owns. We also have an inventory of a lot of the concession assets.
“Our second strategy is to ensure that we take steps to optimize the investment assets as well as other assets that are under our custody that government owns to add value to them. And at the appropriate time, and once a decision has been made that we need to either divest from that asset, it will be done in a transparent manner by the agencies that are responsible for undertaking that exercise.”
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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