Dr Jumoke Oduwole, Senior Special Assistant to the president on Industry, Trade and Investment, has called for a collaborative work among all stakeholders to improve the business climate in the country.
Oduwole who is also the Secretary, Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council ( PEBEC), made this call in Abuja on Thursday at the Lunch Time Seminar of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR).
The theme of the seminar is: “Removing Constraints to Doing Business in Nigeria “.
She said that a lot of rich people in the country are not investing in Nigeria as a result of the binding constraint of doing business.
She added that there must be proper planning to eliminate the critical binding constraint of doing business in the country.
According to her, Nigeria is not doing well in the space as it is currently ranked 169 out of the 190 countries.
She added that this made the Federal Government to issue three executive orders to remove some the constraints to ease process of doing business.
”There are three main pillars that form the foundation for the executive orders which are transparency/efficiency, default approval and one government.
”For this to succeed, the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo address grade levels 8-14 to explain that for a country to succeed, it requires the efficiency of the civil servants.
”It also fosters cooperation between the ministries, agencies and also across states, National Assembly and private sector.
”In other word, there must be proper planning to eliminate the critical binding constraints.
”It also requires a collaborative work across the different arms of government, stakeholders, civil servants as this will improve the business climate in Nigeria, ” she said.
Earlier, Dr Joe Abah, Director-General, BPSR said a key concern to government had been on how to revive investment, particularly private investment- both foreign and domestic, to improve business climate.
He said that the government had mandated government agencies to spend more of their budgets on locally produced goods and to promote budget transparency and efficiency.
He said the idea was to make government agencies and government work more efficiently and transparently for the people which was the primary goal of all public service reforms efforts.
He added that the National Assembly has also been working hard to ensure that it passes the critical bills that would boost Nigeria’s Doing Business Report Ranking.
He said the world bank 2017 report on ‘Doing Business’ covering 190 countries showed that in Africa, Mauritius ranked 49, Rwanda 56, Morocco 68, Botswana 71 and South Africa 74.
He said these were the top countries with regards to the ease of doing business while Nigeria was ranked 169.
According to him, there are several impediments to doing business in Nigeria and the environment for entrepreneurship was challenging for businesses.
“BPSR considers the Federal Government’s Executive Order on the ease of doing business to be an extremely important policy initiative on improving transparency in the business environment.
” It is for this reasons that the BPSR has also intervened to improve the Driver’s Licensing System, the passport issuance system and the process of seeing a doctor in a government hospitals.
” We have also worked hard to reposition a number of agencies for prompt service delivery particularly around touting and bureaucratic corruption which we hope the executive orders will address, ” he said.
(NAN)
FAK/KTE/AFA