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Udeze Ekene
Guest
The Director-General of Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Chinyere Almona, has criticized President Bola Tinubu for calling on citizens to exercise patience with his administration while the politicians are living big.
Dr. Chinyere Almona said the President is not being sincere with the citizens. She decried that politicians are living more comfortably than manufacturers who are producing and creating jobs for the citizens.
In an interview with Arise TV on Tuesday, Mrs. Almona explained that the country’s environment is not business-friendly.
While admitting that Nigeria is full of opportunities, she noted that the youths who need jobs cannot harness the opportunities because of corruption, inflation, high interest rates and unfavourable policies of the government.
The LCCI DG said, “I think in most sectors in Nigeria there is opportunity to drive development. What has been lacking is the ease of doing that. So you have a lot of businesses, you have a lot of entrepreneurs who want to go into business. Even the young ones, like we talked about just now, they want to go into business, start their own business, employ people and do so much more in the different sectors. But they are hampered by several things.
“They are hampered by regulation and the fact that regulation stifles rather than promotes. They are hard hit by the inflation, they are hard hit by inability to access finance and the fact that interest rate is so high. They are hard hit by just the basic difficulty in living. And so it just then makes it challenging to operate.
“There are opportunities. I think Nigeria is filled with opportunities. We are rich with opportunities in the different sectors. In mining, there are opportunities in agriculture, there are opportunities. But the private sector isn’t allowed to move. And so you have situations where companies are leaving Nigeria and they are increasing the rate of unemployment because every factory that shuts down, you shove 50,000 people into the employment market. So that’s what the challenge is.
“There are opportunities, but how do we harness those opportunities? How does the government create an enabling environment for businesses to thrive? I was listening to the President’s speech today and he talked about how he wants to harness the youth and the energy of the youth, how he wants to bring them together, how he wants to create jobs. Bringing youth together to talk is great, but then after the talk, then what next?”
Speaking on the 30 days National Youth Conference announced by the President in his Independence Day broadcast, Mrs Almona noted that unless policies are made to create ease of doing business, the result of the conference may not have much effect.
She added that the country’s problem remains leadership, stating that everything falls and rises on the back of leadership.
“So if you have a conference, after the conference, what next? Have you created an enabling environment for them to thrive? The environment is still rife with corruption. And when you have corruption, that means people don’t get the right opportunities or the right access to the right avenues that they need to succeed.
“Leadership is a problem. Leadership, everything falls and rises on the back of leadership, and we need to get leadership right. Today, with the hard economic conditions, we want to see, and what the President did say, oh, we should be patient and watch and wait for the reforms to kick in and begin to give us some positive vibes, as it were.
“I think about it, and the private sector is bleeding. The youth are struggling. But the political circles are living big. We see them all the time. We see them on social media. We see them in the media. They don’t seem bothered. They don’t seem affected by the hardship that Nigerians are facing. And that is a real problem, where you have the political sect being richer than the private sector, who are in the production area. That’s a problem. We need to support production. We need to power production as much as possible,” Dr Almona added.
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