The Minister of Finance and Coordinating
Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has said the spate of
unemployment in the country is giving her sleepless nights.
Okonjo-Iweala said this while inspecting
an ultramodern Information and Communications Technology factory of
Omatek Nigeria Plc in Lagos on Friday.
She said, “According to the National
Bureau of Statistics, each year, about 1.8m young Nigerians enter into
our labour market and we need to ensure that our economy provides jobs
for them.
“In fact, some people ask, ‘What keeps
you awake at night, with regard to this economy?’ I say it is the issue
of job creation. And I know this is what keeps Mr. President (Goodluck
Jonathan) awake at night as well.
“That is why we have responded to the
challenge of creating jobs by trying to transform several sectors of the
economy; from agriculture, where we’re expecting to create 3.5m jobs
and where the progress of reaching our goal of feeding this country is
already well advanced.”
The minister said Nigeria lacked institutions on which to build its developmental programmes.
“When you look at Nigeria, for over 50
to 60 years, we’ve been working without the key institutions that some
other people have. We keep making stopgap solutions. For 50 years, we
didn’t have a Bureau for Public Procurement; for 50 years, we didn’t
have a Debt Management Office.
“So many of the institutions that we
have now are new and if you stand back, you’ll see there are still many
gaps. It is now our job to try to fill those gaps.”
Okonjo-Iweala said the Federal Government was putting in place more initiatives to encourage small and medium scale enterprises.
She noted that the Central Bank of Nigeria had put in place a N200bn guaranty fund for SME’s to access bank loans.
Okonjo-Iweala said, “Let me mention that
the Minister of Information and Communications technology has started a
Venture Capital Fund with about $15m, which is being financed by the
government and other donors.
“The idea behind it is to help support
innovative enterprises in the field of ICT. This is designed to lift up
some of the young people in Computer Village doing all sorts of
innovations.”
She asked investors to encourage public
investment in their businesses and to list their companies on the
Nigerian Stock Exchange.
The minister said the capital market had been revamped to allow the listing of SMEs through the Alternative Securities Market.
According to her, the platform has made
it easier for SMEs to list their companies and to raise additional
resources from the capital market.
She added that there were advisers to
help small scale investors meet their listing requirements and to help
them on how to get listed.
The minister, who described the stock
market as a challenging one due to “infrastructural bottlenecks,” said
in spite of the challenges, companies had kept growing and maintained
high quality standards.
She noted that ICT remained one of the
main platforms for the creation of jobs, adding that e-commerce was
striving in Nigeria, while more companies were carrying out transactions
online.
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