Zainab Usman, director of the Africa program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says only Lagos state has successfully diversified its fiscal revenues.
Usman made the remark during the public presentation of her book: Economic Diversification in Nigeria–The Politics of Building a Post-oil Economy in Abuja on Tuesday.
She said out of the 36 states in the country, only Lagos has over the years developed and diversified her fiscal revenues following tax and governance reforms by successive administrations in the state.
Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos, has diversified its revenues. Federal transfers have declined to around 20 per cent of the state’s revenues while 80 per cent comes from internal sources”, Usman said.
“The fiscal diversification is the result of deliberate policy reforms. Ruling elites became reform-oriented because of constraints such as intra-party factionalization, population explosion, urban decay, violent crimes and inter-government schisms. These constraints pressured ruling elites to implement tax and public finance reforms.
“Successive policymakers built a political coalition that envisioned the transformation of Lagos into a global megacity, through tax and governance reforms”.
