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ECONOMY: Low interest rates key to growth of Nigeria’s economy- Speaker Dogara

February 23, 2018

…As Nigeria cannot rely on foreign investors to grow economy
By Olayinka Ajayi
In a bid to boost the nation economy, Nigeria's Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, stated that unless interest rates on loans in Nigeria are reduced, the nation’s economy will continue to rely on investors from other countries to make it grow.
Speaking at a briefing on Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (EGRP) by the Federal government’s economic team led by the Minister of National Planning  at the National Assembly, Speaker Dogara said, “ The Nigerian economy is structured and organised, is it possible for people who have investible ideas to have access to funds to be able to invest, or do we continue to rely on monies flowing in from other jurisdictions to our country?
" If graduate each year have access to funds at single digits, some of them may not even bother about the jobs that we are talking about. They will be able to pursue ideas and dreams that they have and those dreams may lead to generation of the jobs that others are seeking."
“What  government can do is to bring down interest rates so that people can access these funds and develop our economy? I do not know where we are going to get 404 billion dollars from, for instance, in Nigeria, I don’t know where. I don’t even know if we can raise 12 billion dollars from private sector in this country, except we rely on outsiders. But the point is that we should dominate the space ourselves and the only way we can do that is to bring down interest rates. It is something we cannot run away from.”
He further commended the executive for carrying the legislature along in its initiatives aimed at revamping the economy, while reiterating that the National Assembly will continue to partner the executive to seek ways and means to improve the economy.
Adding that "for the first time, we have a body consisting of the executive and the legislature working together on the ease of doing business and in this parliament, there were times we passed laws within the space of a month and I said we have turned to a particular parliament, that can pass a law within hours but it is just because we are interested in working together to deliver the promise of democracy to our people, which is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The speaker expressed optimism that the plan of the executive will be fully implemented, saying that Nigeria has never been short of ideas and visions to move forward but has been held back by lack of implementation of the many ideas that were conceptualised.
“In Nigeria, we have never lacked vision, we have had people who have seen vision 2020, so many development plans have been drawn but the problem has been implementation and all of us gave the charge to the minister that it wasn’t just enough to conceptualise this vision on paper but at least we must have a statement that will lead to the implementation of this wonderful plan and I am happy that today we are talking about the implementation of the plan and we have a very smart team that has decided that we shouldn’t just learn from experience by trying our hands on so many things and then we only learn when we get our fingers burnt, but that we have decided that we will learn from the experience of others,” he stated.

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