UNDUE focus on the extractive activities without value addition, poor infrastructure to support processing and packaging, ineffective supply-chain framework among others, have been listed as part of the challenges facing export in Nigeria.
Others are high freight charges due to lack of indigenous vessel owners, enormous paperwork, manual and cumbersome port processes, inefficient warehousing facilities and export processing terminals.
Dr Ozoemena Nnaji, the Director of Trade and Exchange Department, CBN, made the above observation in her contribution at a one-day seminar for members of the Finance Correspondents Association of Nigeria (FICAN) organised by the CBN, recently, with the theme, ‘Policy Options for Economic Diversification: Thinking Outside the Crude Oil-Box.’
She also said that cash flow of diaspora remittances through the ‘Naira 4 Dollar Scheme’ recorded $2.4 billion in 2022, adding that the gains have been vast.
She cited that in 2021, remittances recorded through this scheme were $2.9 billion whereas eight months into 2022, Nigeria has recorded $2.4 billion.
According to her, the CBN is considering improving the scheme to have a more streamlined approach which would enhance diaspora remittances in collaborations with other government parastatals.
At the 33rd Seminar for Finance Correspondents and Business Editors, which was held simultaneously in Lagos and Abuja, Nnaji said, “In 2021, we were able to record $2.9 billion of cash inflows, so far this year we have recorded $2.4 billion. So, in half of the year, we have gotten almost what we got in the year 2021.”
On his part, Chief Executive Officer of Adedipe & Associates, Dr Biodun Adedipe, said there was the need to ensure professionalisation of both the civil service and public service to address the current economic quagmire just as he advocated meritocracy and diversity in appointments while identifying MDAs that directly drive the economy and appoint proven professionals to lead them.
He said, “Reduce the size of MDAs and pay well, align pay to productivity, retention in office, redeployment or exit must depend on performance and ensure accountability from the top leadership,” he advised.
An economist and Chief Economic Strategist in ECOWAS Commission, Dr Ken Ife, praised the CBN’s flagship Anchor Borrowers programme (ABP) citing it as timely and has helped avert food crisis.
He said, “We would have been buying a bag of rice at N70,000 to N100,000 and if we didn’t have the intervention from CBN, it would not only have been on importing food, we would have had more people dying from hunger, poverty, and starvation in Nigeria than victims of conflict and COVID-19 put together.”
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