What Osinbajo told world leaders about Nigerian economy in Davos

Nigeria’s vice president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, at the World Economic Forum 2018 in Davos has told world leaders that Nigerian economy improved beyond government expectations in 2017.

Osinbajo is the leader of Nigerian delegates to the global economic event in Switzerland, which holds between 23-26 January 2018.

In an interview with CNBC Africa, he said the economy is in good condition and a better performance is projected for 2018.

Osinabajo said: “On the economy, it is even better than our expectations. We achieved 1.1 percent positive growth this year (2017) and non-oil export are up by 40 percent. We are experiencing better more revenue from oil, apparently, the oil price has gone up.”

“We are generally seeing an improved economic space, investments have gone up by almost 100 percent. That is the foreign investment.”

Attracting foreign investment

Osinbajo hinted that one of the reasons for Nigeria’s attendance at the event is to attract foreign investments to the country. He also mentioned that the country is undergoing reforms to see this happen.

“…we have some acknowledgement from the world, especially the World Bank, that Nigeria is a place that is open for business. and we listed among the top 10 reforming countries in the world and foreign investors are looking towards our way on account of the fact that they see positive development in creating an enabling environment for business.”

“We have also released our investment regime which details available incentives across all sectors of the economy. So, it is a bullish period for use in terms of attracting business and we are happy for that.”

On Nigeria’s dream of growing her food locally

In recent time, there have been massive interventions in improving agricultural productivity, reducing importation and improving food security in Nigeria.

On this, Osinbajo said: “this is going very well indeed. Let’s take rice and wheat for examples. We import $3 billion worth of rice and wheat, and today we are one of the largest producers of paddy rice and we are doing close to 11 million metric tonnes in a year.”

“Milling is a problem and I think we will be rice sufficient by early 2019… at the same time, Agriculture also mean more jobs, especially in the farming area.”

Infrastructure development and performance of capital market

Osinbajo also talked about the bullish state of Nigerian capital market. The Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) was recently rating as one of the 5 best performing stock markets in the world. He also expressed government readiness to sustain the market’s bullish trend and investors’ confidence.

Government programme on infrastructural development was also outlined by Osinbajo, and he said this is expected to spur economic growth.

“For infrastructural facilities, we are going to do quite a bit in the power sector. We are doing between 7000MW and 9000M. With improvements in transmission and distribution that would be able to make an impact.”

“At present, the impact isn’t as wide we wanted it to be and deep as we wanted it to be. We want this consumer to feel the impact and that has to do with a lot of investment in transmission and distribution which we are doing. The last mile investments to get to the consumers.”

“In respect to rail, we are doing a lot of work in rail. We are doing the Lagos-kano rail- the new standard cage and that has already started with the Lagos-Ibadan end of it. We will be investing close to $10 billion dollars and we are some funding from the Chinese with the counterpart funding from Nigeria has been paid.”