THE Federal Government has assured stakeholders in Nigeria’s business community that it would promote an enabling business environment in a sustainable manner.
Speaking at a breakfast meeting organised by a global financial consultancy firm, KPMG Financial Services, in Lagos on Tuesday, the Minister of Trade and Investment, Dr Okechukwu Enelamah, stated that creating an enabling environment is key to solving Nigeria’s economic challenges and that the government has identified it and set up machineries in motion to tackle it.
According to him, “when I was invited to join the government from the private sector, I soon realised the importance of creating an enabling environment by building trust, confidence and structure. So we made a choice that this would be one of the priorities of the government.
“We have observed that there exists strong correlation between ease of doing business ranking and economic prosperity. If we do this, business will prosper and Nigerians will prosper as well. There is room for improvement, but we know that there is big work to be done. Nigeria has been falling behind on key economic indicators over the last few years.”
He noted that one of the reasons dollar scarcity is prevalent in Nigeria is because the country is not doing enough to attract foreign investors with huge financial potentials into the economy.
“The president and the vice president shared the view of providing an enabling business environment and I am sure it is going to happen. We have constituted a Presidential Business Environment Council, chaired by the the acting president and vice-chaired by the Minister of Trade and Investment.
We meet monthly to provide coordination across ministries and bottlenecks challenges,” he said.
He pointed out that three priority areas of the committee include entry and exit of people, goods and transparency.