Food prices will soon fall —Osinbajo

With food prices skyrocketing beyond the reach of most Nigerians, the Federal Government is already finalising strategies to reign the trend and bring succour to Nigerians in the next few months.

Acting President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo gave this indication at an interactive forum with federal public servants on grade level 8-14 convened to intimate them on the Executive Orders recently issued on the Ease of Doing Business Initiative in Abuja on Tuesday.

According to him, government is aware that locally produced food items particularly rice is more expensive that the imported brands but disclosed that governments of rice exporting countries were deliberately subsidizing their farmers to make those products cheaper than Nigerian produced rice.

“Its worrisome that locally produced rice is still expensive than imported rice from India, China and Thailand. Rice produced in these countries, are subsidized by their respective governments making rice from the region cheap and affordable.

“They do this deliberately because they know that by subsiding rice production for their farmers, more jobs are created. And that is what we should also be conscious of: that each time we consume imported rice, we export jobs.

“We are planning to introduce some kinds of assistance to our farmers in due course.  Our rice will have to compete with any rice in the world. We will hold meeting with the   Ministry of Agriculture   every day.”

He then gave the assurance that Federal Government is presently finalising arrangements that will give assistance to Nigerians farmers and that such efforts would become glaring in the next few months when prices begin to fall.

Osinbajo urged public officers to develop the spirit of patriotism that will propel them to make it easy for businesses to commence and by so doing create wealth and jobs.

“In every country where it has been done, it is the collective will of the people that made it possible. Every time that an officer, whether in the executive, legislature or judiciary puts forward what he could do today, he has prevented some businesses from commencing and therefore pushed forward jobs from being created.

“If civil servants change for better and do what is supposed of them, our country will change for better.  Nothing is more heartbreaking than seeing your son/daughter not doing anything years after graduating. Already government is committing over 70% of her resources on overheads. So the power house of any economy is the private sector who create the jobs”, he added.

At the forum where public officials raised questions on how the Executive Orders would work, suggestions were also made on the need to light up Nigeria for industries to grow.

Responding to an enquiry on electricity, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola disclosed that 350 of the about 900 containers loaded with electricity equipment trapped at the ports for many years have now been cleared.

This he said was made possible through budgetary provisions for such clearance in the 2016 and now 2017 budgets.

He said his ministry had developed power service recovery program, which is a combination of policy and enforcement to make business of power supply more efficient.

Earlier, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment Dr. Okechukwu Enelamah in a presentation tilted “Promotion of Transparency and Efficiency in Business Environment” had told the audience that government is striving to make Nigeria more business friendly because of its quest to become Africa’s leading economy.