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Osinbajo, five governors to grace BusinessDay CEO Forum

Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and five Nigerian governors are among personalities in business and governance that will attend and offer insights at the 2019 edition of BusinessDay CEO Forum. The event holds Tuesday, December 3, at the Lagos Continental Hotel, Victoria Island.

The CEO Forum is an annual event that brings together business leaders to dissect key trends, best practices and successful business models. It has over the years provided a unique platform for debate around challenges that confront business executives within Nigerian operating environment and beyond.

The 2019 edition, 11th in the series, with the theme ‘Nigeria At Cross Roads: The Private Sector Opportunity,’ will have Peter Tufano, Dean and Professor of Finance, Said Business School, Oxford University, delivering the keynote address.

Tufano, an accomplished scholar, before moving to Oxford in 2011, had spent over three decades at Harvard University where he completed his AB in Economics, MBA and PhD in Business Economics, spending 22 years in the faculty. He will be enriching the forum with his vast knowledge in consumer finance, financial innovation, risk management and corporate financial engineering and mutual funds.

The governors that will grace the event this year are generally acknowledged as some of the best brains in governance. They include Godwin Obaseki of Edo; Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos; Dapo Abiodun of Ogun; Emeka Ihedioha of Imo, and David Umahi of Ebonyi.

Obaseki, who assumed office November 12, 2016, is credited with turning around the education sector with the launch Edo Basic Education Transformation (EdoBEST) programme, an initiative to train and equip public school teachers with top-of-the-range skills and expertise for deploying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in classrooms to improve learning outcomes.

He is also applauded to have through the Alaghodaro (Edo Investment) Summit attracted new investments to Edo in areas of agriculture, manufacturing, health, while also focusing on infrastructure development.

“In the area of economic growth, we are emphasising production, industrialisation and working hard to have independent source of electricity. We are emphasising technical education for our people and primary healthcare,” Obaseki recently said.

Sanwo-Olu, since assumption of office on May 29, 2019, has devoted energy and time to address the perennial gridlocks and other environmental issues in Nigeria’s economic hub by fixing the roads, aimed at further creating the right atmosphere for businesses and living.

“We are at the stage of building critical infrastructure that will make our state more habitable. We want technology to drive economic innovation, public security, health management, waste management, traffic management, government processes and services to the public,” Sanwo-Olu said during his recent visit to China where he secured the commitment of leading technology companies, including Ehang and Huawei, to support his government’s vision of transforming Lagos into a smart city.

In Ogun, Abiodun, who took the oath of office on May 29, 2019, is acknowledged to have within six months in office, launched the Ogun job portal, agricultural revolution, purchased patrol vehicles and motorcycles to security agencies and the Ogun Tech Hub in Abeokuta with a five-day free training in soft skills like Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing, Web Development, Cyber Security, Mobile Application Development, Data Science, IT Business, Emerging IT Trends: Big Data, IoT, Cloud Computing, and Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM), among others.

Ihedioha is seen repositioning the economy of Imo for development in all its facets.

The Imo Growth and Strategic Development Agenda plan (G-SDP), a two-stage development horizon of a five-year economic blueprint conceived by the transition technical committee set up the government, provides the roadmap for the overall economic growth and development of the state. They include among other things the delivery of 381km rural access road projects, restoration of an improved Owerri master plan, restoration of water supply in Owerri metropolis, roll out of a state health insurance scheme as well as the reactivation of four technical education institutions in the state.

The Ihedioha’s administration has also focused on human capital development, agriculture and food security, infrastructure, industrialisation and job creation as well as security and environment.

“Imo State is now on track to join open governance partnership which now qualifies it for performance based grants of the World Bank and other multinational development institutions,” Ihedioha recently said. Umahi, a second-term governor, is making the people of Ebonyi State proud.

He is credited with the completion of over 20 roads within the capital city of Abakaliki, rebuilding some federal roads, especially the Afikpo-Abakaliki Road and the Nkalagu Road.

Umahi has also reconstructed and equipped schools as well as approved the promotion of the state university staff – a decision that had stalled for years.

The governor declared emergency in the health sector and undertook the reconstruction of general hospitals as well as built the first virology centre in the south east from scratch, to reduce Lassa fever deaths. His administration has also spent billions of naira as soft loans to farmers, targeting expanded rice farming, which has raised rice production in the state.

The previous editions of the CEO Forum had featured leading visionaries as Michael Porter, the world acclaimed economist and researcher at the Harvard Business School; Paul Collier, Professor of Economic and Public Policy at the Blatvanik School of Government and the University of Oxford; Richard Ingleton, the global CEO of TNS – one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups; Richard Lesser, the President and CEO of American global management consultancy, the Boston Consulting Group, among others.

Knowledge Partner for the 2019 CEO Forum is McKinsey & Company, the trusted advisor and counsellor to many of the world’s most influential businesses and institutions, while MTN, Vodacom, Simba, Guinness, Seplat and Mastercard are some of the sponsors.

 

JOSHUA BASSEY