Former Governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke, says Nigeria’s economy has to grow at least 15% annually for 10 years “to recalibrate the system.”
Duke, who made this comment during an interview with Deutsche Welle Africa on Friday, June 8, 2018, revealed that to achieve this he will take a two-pronged approach that will involve lowering interest rates and exploring alternative energy options.
Asked how he will do better than Buhari, 56-year-old Duke said, “Creating jobs, jobs, jobs. Boom the economy. I’ll take two simple items”.
The presidential hopeful said: “First of all, you can’t grow your economy with the type of banking system you run where the interest rate regime is in the upper 20s.
You need to have affordable credits and that will enable the small and medium scale businessmen borrow and expand their businesses. Thousands of businesses have closed down because they can’t afford their interest rate regime, and this is self-inflicted.
“Nigeria grew faster when we had some form of regulation on interest rates and the interest rates were in the single digits. Our economy did a lot more better than it is doing today.
“Here you are flaring about 2 to 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas daily and we’ve done this for about 30 years. That’s equivalent to about 25 million litres of diesel that we burn on a daily basis. Now, all you need to do is clean up that gas, have a network, pipe it throughout the length and breadth of this country and make it available to industry.
“That’ll free electricity on the national grid for residential and domestic use but let the industry, particularly the baked energy consumers, be on gas. And hey, you’re flaring the gas, give the gas for next to nothing.
You can give it up for free because you’re flaring it anyway. That will be our subsidy due to industry. That will catalyse growth in the economy. That will create jobs for folks. That’ll pay itself back because your taxable return will be much higher than it is today.
“We import literally everything, we need to substitute. The things we can make here, we make them here but that would only happen if you have affordable credits and energy and of course the right policies”, he said.
Despite his opposition of Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, the former Governor supports his administration’s ban on rice importation, noting that it doesn’t benefit Nigerians in any way.
“We shouldn’t import what we can easily provide. We’re developing the economy, we need to create jobs and importing rice is just creating jobs overseas at the expense of our people”, he said.
