The Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria (MAN) has backed the move by the Federal Government to sell some national assets such as its share of the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) company.
However, MAN said government should cut down its equities in some of the companies where it had majority shares for them to be run efficiently rather than sell them outright.
Addressing a press conference on the 2016 annual Manufacturers’ lecture to be delivered by the President/CEO of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote in Abuja on Thursday, President of MAN, Dr. Frank Jacobs said the move would help to shore up the country’s foreign reserve and boost investors’ confidence in the economy.
He said the lecture with the theme, “Diversifying the Nigerian Economy: The Role of Government in Manufacturing” would provide insight on the manufacturers’ expectations for 2017 and suggest policy direction of the current recession that the nation’s economy was experiencing.
Jacobs said Nigeria was currently in recession because both domestic and foreign investors had lost confidence in the economy owing largely to the plummeting foreign reserve.
The President also predicted that the country would come out of recession in the first quarter of next year through implementing the right policies and engaging the private sector.
“The recession has come because of some mistakes we made in the past, some of the things we ought to put in place that we failed to put in place and we can’t come out of it by December because it is deep-rooted. The person saying we would come out of recession by December is only deceiving himself, maybe at the end of the first quarter of next year,” he said.
Jacobs who hailed the steps being taken in the agriculture sector as reassuring urged the government to, as part of measures to reflate the economy, reduce its shares in some companies to beef off the foreign reserves; pump money into critical infrastructures and engage the private sector in order to arouse the interest of foreign investors.
Source: Daily Trust
