Nigeria needs to diversify its income beyond oil exports by finding ways to generate more taxes from other industries, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said.
“We need to ramp up our efforts to tax the non-oil sectors of the economy to create more revenue for the government,” Okonjo-Iweala told reporters today in the capital, Abuja.
Nigeria, Africa’s biggest crude producer and its largest economy, relies on oil sales for about 70% of its income, a figure that should fall to 60 percent and eventually to 33%, she said.
Producers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Eni SpA, among others, operate in the country.
Nigeria, a country of about 170 million people, is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The government is targeting 7.2 trillion naira ($45billion) in income from oil and gas this year alone.
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