Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE), Dr. Musa Yusuf has stated that Nigeria needs confidence to achieve stability in the economy and to boost investments from domestic investors and foreign investors.
Speaking at the Business News Summit themed ” Repositioning Nigerian Economy: 2023 and Beyond”, amongst other speakers, in Lagos on Wednesday, Dr Musa acknowledged the fact that the economy is presently taking a downturn.
” The dominant worry today about the economic players and the citizens is the health of the Nigerian economy.The anxiety and apprehension are palpable and profound.This is understandable given the economic shocks of the recent months”.
“The experience of economic players and the citizens over the past couple of months has been very unsettling.The shocks are pervasive among the broad spectrum of the business community micro, small, medium and large enterprises.The informal sector is not spared”.
He noted that the present administration is doing it’s best to sustain the economy even when it was at the verge of collapsing.
” The current administration is grappling with a legacy of weak macroeconomic fundamentals.Currency volatility, high fiscal deficit, low revenue, surging debt levels, declining reserves and weak investors confidence”.
” The evidence of the deteriorating macroeconomic conditions did not fully manifest before the exit of the previous administration.But the reality was that the economy was already on the brink”.
Dr Musa further explained that the immediate amendments were put in place to manage the situation but the process comes with struggles.
” The current reforms were designed to correct the legacy of economic distortions and deteriorating macroeconomic fundamentals. Regrettably, the reforms had come with enormous pains, especially with regards to the spike in energy costs, acceleration of food inflation to over 30% and surge in transportation cost.These reforms were necessary to pull the economy back from the brink”.
According to him, the way forward to a better economic system includes:” investors’ confidence building beginning with the cleaning of backlog of forex mature obligations, boosting reserves through enhanced crude oil production, leverage government assets to enhance inflows through equity investments, incentives FDI and FPI flows, curbing speculative activities through oversight, surveillance of the deposit money banks and deepening of import substitution to ease forex demand pressure, especially with regards to petroleum products importation”.
Still speaking in the same vein, the Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) , Dr Aminu Maida who was represented by Assistant Director, NCC , Mr Ismail Adedigba said the government has the vision to accelerate the growth of Nigeria and its global technical talent hub by training young citizens.
” The Federal Government is targeting the training of 3 million citizens in digital literacy.This project which has commenced with over 1 million applications by potential trainees is expected to increase the level of digital literacy among Nigerians especially young and middle-level talents of 70% by the end of 2027″.
He assured that the training will improve the state of the economy .
” This would help Nigeria to productively contribute to the economy and place the country in the top 25 percentile of research globally in the key areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), unmanned Aerial View Vehicles (UAVs), IoT, Robotics, Blockchain and Additive manufacturing” he said.
