We Must Retain Domestic Businesses Before Seeking Foreign Investors – Trade Minister

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Jumoke Oduwole, has said the federal government must do everything possible to retain domestic businesses.

Mrs. Jumoke Oduwole explained that the best advertisement for Nigeria’s economy is domestic businesses.

In an interview with Arise TV on Monday, Mrs. Oduwole said that when the business environment, including the regulatory environment, bureaucracy, legislative, and judicial reforms, encourages domestic businesses’ growth and improves their productivity and scale, the country will be sure of more foreign investors coming in.

“For competitiveness, one of the things that is a priority for me in this new position is to make sure that we retain domestic investment.

“This has always been one of the sound bites from all the years of PEBEC, that the domestic businesses are the best advertisement for the Nigerian economy and when you can facilitate business and make things easier, regulatory environment, bureaucracy, legislative reforms, judicial reforms, that makes those businesses more comfortable, more productive and they can scale, and then we can fully advertise and beat our chest for foreign direct investment, knowing that they would get a lot of corroboration from the businesses on ground.

“So we will continue to work on that. We’ll also continue to prioritize foreign direct investments,” she said.

The Minister of Trade also disclosed that her ministry was working to grow the agricultural sector and its business value chains.

“We also want to immediately see how we can reintroduce commodity exchanges. That’s really important for our biggest sector, agriculture and the business side of agriculture.

“How we make sure that farmers do get economic remuneration for their labour over the course of seasons and years. Then we need to make sure that the policies work for Nigeria.

“The bilateral agreements, the regional agreements, all the agreements that we need to implement and optimize. And I promised the Senate at my screening that I’ll keep the ground running. There are a number of areas that Nigerians have spoken about for a while and we need to be pragmatic about it,” Mrs. Oduwole added.