I Want To Continue As Finance Minister – Zainab Ahmed

The Former Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed has said she would like to be reappointed as minister of finance.

Ahmed disclosed this while speaking about President Muhammadu Buhari’s new cabinet, at the ongoing Bloomberg Emerging and Frontier Forum in London.

“The president is in the process of putting together a new cabinet. I have not had a discussion with him on whether I am coming back on the cabinet or not,” she said.

“I would like to go back to the cabinet in the same role to continue the work that we started.

“I was only there for nine months, I started a lot of initiatives that I would love to push.”

At the forum, Ahmed also said the government has plans to raise value-added tax to 7.5% by 2020 from the present 5%.

According to the former minister, the rise in VAT would improve revenue generation for the federal government.

 “We have developed a strategic revenue growth initiative, which we have started implementing,” Ahmed said.

“Our target is to increase revenue to 65 per cent minimum in 2019 so that in the next three years, we are able to attain 80-85 per cent of our revenue target.

“We are looking at adding value-added tax from 5% to 7.5%. 5% is one of the lowest VAT globally. The increase will not be done overnight but hopefully, by the next budget (2020), the new increase will take effect.

“We recently increased the minimum wage and one of the agreements we had with labour was that there would be some marginal increase on VAT to enable us to handle the incremental cost of increasing wages.”