Nigeria’s economic growth hasn’t been all-inclusive – NESG boss on September 21, 2015

Mr. Kyari Abba Buka is the Chairman, Nigeria Economic Summit Group, NESG. In this interview with Vanguard, he spoke on some issues bedevilling the Nigerian economy, way forward, and activities of the forthcoming 21st summit slated for Abuja from October 13-15, 2015.

*Kyari

Excerpts:
What is the objective of this 21ST summit?
The objective or rather let
me start with the theme of the 21st summit.  In Nigeria, we’ve been having the summit every year for the last 21 years since the Nigerian Economy Summit, Group was founded. This year’s theme is basically achieving competitiveness, inclusive growth and sustainability.
In economy such as ours, government especially with this new dispensation may indeed make tough choices because the things about the execution of strategy for an enterprise or for a country is that one must have the discipline and determination to say that these are the most important things that we need to pay attention to and we need to execute them. And for Nigeria, we have to be in a hurry to fix some of these issues; we have to be competitive or to be globally competitive and we cannot exonerate ourselves from the rest of the world. We have to pay attention to our infrastructure problem, and when people talk about the infrastructure and investment in infrastructure, it is of course to us the rail , roads, the water , our airport  etc.
The infrastructure is all the basic ingredients, that if they are in good running condition, the economy would continue to grow at a faster rate. Now, that of course, requires a lot of money and time to achieve.  However, the discussion to be expected in the summit is to pay attention to those aspects of the economy that would be fixing them and will basically catalyse to growth.  We have reported that in the past 10 years or so that Nigeria had grown at the average of 7 percent and so on and so forth. But these in my own personal views were not all that inclusive growth.  Nobody has kept statistics of that growth whether that growth is commensurate with employment growth, and how it affects the basic lives of the average citizens.