 |
| Former Prime Minister of Georgia, Nika Gilauri |
A former Prime Minister of Georgia, Nika Gilauri, on Monday
urged the Federal Government to step up the Public- Private- Partnership (PPP),
Tax to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) income and the anti-graft campaign if
Nigeria desires to reform its economy.
Gilauri said the country must overshadow its competitors and
use “out of the box ideas” to help the reform process initiated by President
Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
He spoke at the 2017 Annual General Conference of the
Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Lagos.
Using his country as a model, Gilauri said Georgia
previously ranked as the 112th worst place in the world to do business but
climbed to eighth place in the world after reforms were implemented.
He said finding the right formulas in measuring performances
are pivotal to the economic growth of countries like Nigeria.
On the PPP, Gilauri said: “Depending on the right formulas,
if PPPs are done properly, it can bring about amazing results.
“In Georgia, we did a huge and successful healthcare reform
based on PPP, in a small country like Georgia, it was an amazing feat.
“It is hard to get Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in oil
rich countries like Nigeria because of the perception of foreign investors who
feel that such countries are wealthy.
“For Georgia, we were able we were able to lure investors by
saying we were poor and in dire need of funding. Investments were one of the
driving forces for the reform in Georgia.”
The former prime minister noted that Nigeria’s tax to GDP
income rate of one to six percent was “significantly low.”
He added: “Nigeria needs to increase tax revenues to GDP by
simplifying the tax process; this is something that I believe the Nigerian
economy can improve because they are a lot of investments to be made in the
country.”
Gilauri said if his country which had gained notoriety for
corruption was able to become one of the least corrupt nations in the world,
Nigeria could achieve the same feat.
“In 2004, we were the fifth most corrupt country in the
world, in 2010 Georgia became the eighth least corrupt country in the world;
there is nothing like innate or cultural corruption.
“This transformation happened in five to six years. It was
an amazing transformation and we have seen the measures the government of
Nigeria is taking to fight corruption,” he said.
Gilauri noted that Georgia’s anti-corruption fight was based
on three pillars – outsourcing and privatisation, simplification and attracting
new people by giving good salaries.
“We tried outsourcing to get rid of possible corrupt
practices, at a stage we even outsourced tax audits.
“Government policies have to be simplified and you have to
attract new people as well as give good salaries.
“You cannot expect a civil servant to behave properly if he
is not paid properly, so we introduced a performance based bonus system into
the Georgian civil service,” he stated.
0 comments:
Post a Comment