Budget delay: Construction sector will suffer in 2018 —Omotola

With the benefits of hindsight, the delay in passing into law, Nigeria’s 2018 appropriation bill, is already having  huge effects on the construction industry, one of the sectors that stimulate employment opportunities in the country.

Besides, except by miracle, the situation is also capable of workers being laid off by construction companies who may not want to incur overhead expenditure over idle workers.

Briefing the media in his Maryland Office last weekend, the Chancellor of E-Boot Camp Limited, Mr. Lai Omotola, said to cushion the effects of the possible backlash of the above scenario, he has embarked on a program aimed at building an army of a great number of entrepreneurs that would radically transform Nigeria’s domestic economy in the next decade.

According to Omotola, the “Think  Entrepreneurship Training initiative” came into being, after due consideration and indept study of Nigeria’s socio-economic situation, which showed that the solution to her problems does not depend 100 percent on the person that becomes the president in 2019.

“Whoever becomes the president in 2019 will have greater challenges ahead. The next four years will not bring us out of the woods regardless of the person that occupies the seat. This is the bitter truth.

Continued, he said: “We have a budget of about N8 trillion. Out of this proposed spending, N1.2 trillion will be used to service debt, about 70 percent will go into recurrent expenditure and less than 25 percent will go into to capital project.

“When we look at the budget performance of capital project, it is less than 50 percent. The budget has not been passed even in May. So, let us assume that the budget is passed by the end of May. We have entered the raining season. For the next five months, it will rain and there is little contractors can do till October if climate change does not make it worse”, he lamented.

For example, construction work will commence in October. By December, construction companies will go on holiday. By implication, we only have two months for construction work. “For me, this suggests that the 2018 budget on the side of capital project has failed even before it is signed.

“We all know that we need massive infrastructure development to leap this economy and sadly this will continue to be the routine for a very long time. Besides, the Federal government will continue to be burdened by labour union for increment in wages across all sector of the economy.

Omotola, currently running a foremost infrastructure company with a diversified project portfolio, reeled out ‘Think Entrepreneurship Training”, which he said if pursued, Nigeria could rise to become “the world’s fifth largest economy by 2038, a period of two decades from now if the entrepreneurial spirit could be liberated in the country.”

He noted that the training programme being introduced to get one million people to commence entrepreneurship, would in the next decade, produce businesses that are in billions turnover.

“We will demystify entrepreneurship. We will also make it friendly. At E-Boot Camp, our belief is that if we can positively change the mind-set of the Nigerian entrepreneurs, then we can build the most robust economy.

“With the potentials we have in our country, if we are able to liberate the entrepreneurial spirit in this country, then in the next two decades, Nigeria should be the world’s fifth largest economy in the world.”

He stated that the programme will start with one hundred beneficiaries, where practical orientation will be taught. It’s not going to be theory, theory, theory, but with real life experience, empirical studies and other methods that would beimparted to them”.

He explained big economies all over the world have always been propelled by private sector led by entrepreneurs, noting that it is entrepreneurs that build economy and not government. What the government does is to create policies that will be pro-business and not anti business.”

Besides, he noted that entrepreneurs built America, citing the roles of people like John Davison Rockefeller Snr, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt,among others, who played in building the economy of the world’s most powerful country.

According to him, these are men who used innovation to build America and not the American government. The US Government only partnered them to make it successful. Nigeria cannot be different if we must radically transform our economy.

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