Vice President Namadi Sambo
Goddy Egene
The Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, their counterpart at the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, and captains of industry among others will headline the first national workshop of the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers (CIS) scheduled to hold in Abuja next Thursday.
The workshop with the theme: “Working the Transformation Agenda-The Real Issues, would be declared open by Vice President Mohammed Namadi Sambo.
Focus at the workshop will be on telecommunications, agriculture and power sectors of the economy. Johnson is expected to speak on “Telecoms as a catalyst for democratising wealth creation.”
Adesina will speak on “Agriculture as a business-The funding, instruments and Policies,” while the Director-General of Bureau of Public Enterprise, Ms. Bola Onogoruwa, would give an insight into the roadmap and status of plans for delivering power.
Giving further details on the workshop, the President of CIS, Mr. Ariyo Olushekun, said it was an annual forum comprising key players in the private and public sectors.
According to him, CIS decided to organise the workshop with the aim of tracking budget performance and contributing to the formulation of Federal Government’s policies.
He added that the forum would generate ideas, which would serve as useful inputs to the national budget and enhance the quality of policy making process.
Speaking in the same vein, the Chairman of the Workshop Committee, Mr. Albert Okumagba, said the workshop had been structured to provide an interface between the policy makers and capital market stakeholders with a view to establishing an on-going dialogue that would ultimately facilitate better policies that would aid sustained economic development.
“Our desire is to facilitate national discourse that will serve as platform for generating strategies for driving visible and measurable changes in the Nigerian economy,” he said.
Okumagba noted that the capital market, which is a major segment of financial markets, provided a setting through medium to long-term resources were provided for productive utilisation.
“Therefore, CIS as a primary professional body for the capital market must play a more involved role in determining policies and participate more activity in economic discourse,” he said.