Dele Alake, Nigeria’s minister of solid minerals development, has said that President Bola Tinubu administration’s courage in taking difficult decisions was putting the economy on a strong footing.
The minister also asserted that Tinubu’s reforms have started yielding results with the resurgence of the economy.
Alake stated this when hosted a delegation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Professionals Forum led by Isa Yuguda, a former governor of Bauchi State, in Abuja, according to a statement by Segun Tomori, his media aide, on Friday.
“The president has chosen to leave a legacy of taking difficult decisions that will herald enduring structures that will not only outlast the administration but also make it impossible for successive administrations to deviate from. The society would have become used to a certain standard of service delivery at the end of the Tinubu administration that Nigerians will no longer settle for anything less.”
“It has become evident that the temporary pain of the reforms is beginning to ease, citing the resurgence of the naira and emerging stability in the forex market,” Alake said.
He further highlighted the administration’s efforts towards infrastructural renewal, citing the Lagos-Calabar coastal road which, on completion, would shorten travel time to the Cross River State capital.
“On completion of that coastal road, the amount of tourism that will be generated along that axis is unimaginable. It will be one of the longest tourism coast town drives in Africa, not to talk of the ease of movement of goods and services; and the economic impact of ports along the route, and it will finally link up to Sokoto, a project which has been in the pipeline for more than 30 years”, Alake noted.
The minister charged the forum as a repository of knowledge and diverse professionals within the APC to contribute their quota to the success of the administration, reiterating that the APC-led Federal Government was open to innovative ideas in its quest to deliver dividends of democracy to Nigerians.
Yuguda commended the minister’s efforts to sanitise and attract global attention to the mining sector, noting that solid minerals remain the key to Nigeria’s economic prosperity.
Read also: Forging a new frontier: The inaugural Solid Minerals Conference by BusinessDay Newspapers
He urged Nigerians and the Federal Government to support the minister to transform the mining sector, stressing that, solid minerals have all it takes to overtake oil as the mainstay of the nation’s economy.
