*Identifies overseas education, health tourism as highest consumer of forex
Dike Onwuamaeze
The Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) has tasked the incoming administration and the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, to have a clear vision and plan for the Nigerian economy.
NECA also enjoined him to go beyond ethnicity and religion to select capable men and women that have insight on how to turn around the Nigerian economy within the shortest possible time, in order to serve as his ministers and head of governmental agencies and departments.
These views were expressed by the Director General of NECA, Mr. Adewale-Smatt Oyerinde, in an interview with select journalists, where he stated that education and health, rather than manufacturing, were the highest consumers of foreign exchange in the country.
Oyerinde also stated that an empirical research was required to identify the real sources of the challenges hobbling the country’s power sector in order to proffer effective solutions to them rather than the current episodic and emotional interventions that depend on the personal interests of the powers that be.
He said: “The president is the one that is elected to fix the economy and he is the person that will share his trajectory on where he wants to take the economy. In that line, it rest on the president to ensure that he understands where he is taking the economy. He must have a firm perspective of what he wants to do concerning the economy.”
The director general explained that such a clear vision of the economy by the incoming president would enable the fiscal and monetary authorities understand their respective roles and work in synergy to achieve the president’s overall economic objectives rather than working at cross purposes, which often sent the wrong signals about Nigerian economy to existing and prospective investors.
“Now the fiscal and the monetary authorities are to help him (president) to achieve these objectives. The actions of the CBN and the Ministry of Finance and all the agencies and departments under the ministry should be to complement each other so that the president’s vision can be achieved because the buck stops on the president’s table,” he said.
Oyerinde, also pointed out that it was fundamental that the incoming government should make sure that round pegs are put in round holes in its allocation of political appointments.
He said: “The ministers and those that will head agencies must be people that understand the issues at stake. The incoming president will have to play the role of a statesman by looking beyond politics, ethnicity and every other issue that has bugged us down as a country to actually pick individuals that can make definitive difference in the context of turning the economy around and turning it around as quickly as possible.”
He also noted that it was imperative for the incoming administration to convene an educational summit that would rethink the country’s educational system.
“We need to carry out curriculum review. Is our curriculum preparing our students for the workplace that is changing rapidly?” he asked, noting that no notion could grow beyond the level of its educational system and available manpower.
He added: “It will surprise you that one of the two major foreign exchange leakages in Nigeria are education and health. These two are the highest consumers of foreign exchange, not even the manufacturing sector.
“So, we need a true summit of all stakeholders in the educational summit to know what exactly is wrong and deal with the issue of low educational standard in this country to reduce the propensity of Nigerian students to study abroad.”
The director general also called on government to take a dispassionate and holistic view in addressing the multidimensional challenges besetting the power sector.
“We need empirical evidence to identify what went wrong before we can provide adequate solutions. Otherwise solutions will be based on perceptions or emotions depending on where one’s interest lies,” he said.
Oyerinde also noted that NECA was collaborating with the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) under the ITF/NECA Skill Development Project to provide technical and vocational trainings.
“It is the direction that we think we should go to deal maximally with the issue of unemployment. We are actually sitting on the keg of the gun powder with a large population of youths out there without employment.
“Therefore, government should give more support to projects like the ITF/NECA Technical Skill Development as a pathway to remove the youths from unemployment.
“Those that will be trained could become either employers of labour or have learnt the skills that the industries needed that will make it easier for them to secure job placements.
“As employers we are concerned and we doing everything within our limit to continue to contribute our quota to reducing the challenges of unemployment,” he said.
