• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Fashola urges ‘tough choices’ to launch Nigeria on economic prosperity

Fashola

Nigeria’s minister for power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, ‎said Nigeria and the African continent must embrace ‘tough choices’ that must see them join global leagues of nation in economic prosperity.

Fashola, who made the submission at the new global partnership for Africa’s development, at the Harvard Kennedy School, on Saturday in the United States of America, said, “Nobody will help African nations fulfil their individual promises except the people of those nations by the choices they make.

“For citizens of African countries and leaders of African nations, they should wake up and smell the coffee. Nobody is going to do Africa any favours and the current generation of Africa’s youth and leaders must quickly banish what I call the “Foreign Investor syndrome.”

‎Speaking further, he noted that Africa had the opportunity to translate huge and abundant natural resources it has to an economic advantage.

According to Fashola,” We have enough resources in copper to dominate technology, enough cassava to replace corn starch with cassava starch, enough cocoa to make our own chocolate, enough nickel iron ore to build our own steel plants and 1.2 Billion people who guarantee a market for what we make and a shared prosperity for as many.‎”

The minister, who argued that the current administration’s tough choices was paying off citing a case in point on reduction of food import bill, said the current administration was embarking on some choices through investment in local production of staple food that the nation spent huge sums to hitherto import.

He said, “President Buhari is leading us in making those tough choices which focuses on growing and producing our basic foods, staples such as rice, wheat, sugar, fish and tomatoes which have seen our import bills for these items reduce drastically between 2015 and 2018 as follows: wheat, sugar, rice, fish and milk.”

Fashola in his remarks notably pointed out that total import bills for these products have reduced from $2.1Billion in 2015 to $595 million in 2018.

Other tough choices, he said the administration was embarking upon were to invest in infrastructure to grow the economy and improve the ease of doing business, which has seen to rail construction, road construction, housing construction, power project development.

He further noted the government is already domesticating the benefits for the nation’s local economy which has led to the Executive Orders that prioritize the employment of local persons and capacities in construction and related businesses irrespective of where the funding comes from.