…Signs MoU with Aig Imoukhuede Foundation, Performance bond contract
By Dele Ogbodo
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr. Jumoke Oduwole and her State counterpart at the Ministry, Senator John Owan Enoh, on Tuesday acknowledged that their 100 days in office have been jam-packed with high impact achievements for Nigerians and its businesses.
Fielding questions from journalists at the end of the 2-Day Retreat for staff of the Ministry which also marked her 100 days in office as Minister at the Bank of Industry (BoI, Headquarters in Abuja, she said the first thing she did on assumption of office was to robustly engage with Nigerian business community and the first 100 top exporters as according to her, her strategic position at the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC), made their challenges known to her.
Meanwhile, the Minister concluded the signing of the Renewed Hope Agenda performance bond contract with the Heads of agencies under the Ministry and also the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Aig Aigboje Imoukhuede Foundation for capacity development and digitalization of the Ministry’s operations.
On her achievements, she said: “So, 100 days have been jam-packed. We believe that we have delivered quite a bit of impact for Nigerian businesses. The first thing we did was to focus on businesses operating in Nigeria.
“Investment retention is extremely important. So, we decided to give them maximum attention. We started with Nigerian exporters in November 2024.
“So, we started implementing that action plan and I think they’ll bear witness. Even with the implementation, the approval of the National Single Window Project, that’s part of it and trade facilitation.
“We also continue to speak with MSMEs and bigger businesses. We took some time to map out what our trade policy review should look like?
“At the end of October, we had our World Trade Organisation (WTO) review, which is once in 7 years. And we had over 400 questions from different countries and this signifies the interest in Nigeria’s economy.”
“We’ve taken those questions and looked at it in terms of how the world sees our economy and what we can do about that. We’ve also taken and aggregated all Mr. President’s trips since before we came on board, over 30 trips, and we saw that about $50 billion has been announced and promised for this Nigerian economy.
According to her, that is the kind of investment that is needed to rebalance re-balance the economy, adding, and we so, we’ve grouped them into sectors, and we’re going after those businesses, those announcements, and those companies to actualize them.
“We have had international outings, we were in Paris, South Africa where we received international guests, like the Prime Minister of India and the President of Germany. We were also in Davos, where we spoke at very targeted intervention.” She said.
Nigeria, she acknowledged is a digital trade champion under the AfCTA, explain that 50% of her GDP are services based which are found in tech, financial services, technology, agri-services, educational services, health services, all the services that Nigerians do so well, the Ministry will focus on for exports.
Oduwole, asked: “How can we dollarize? How can we attract foreign investment? And export proceeds through exports of services. So, we’ve prioritized business operations, outsourcing of business operations. We have an intervention on that.
“So that Nigerian youth can have jobs right from here in Nigeria. They don’t need to ‘Japa’ because they can earn foreign exchange right from here in Nigeria.“We’re on a good time zone. We are an English-speaking population, and Nigerian youth are entrepreneurial, dynamic, mentally agile and suitable not just for customer care programmes, which is fine, but even legal, accounting, health service, tele-health services.
“So, all those kinds of businesses, we’re enabling the environment for that industries because it has been done in India, Philippines. And Nigeria is actively approaching and engaging that market.
“So, in terms of digital trade, public digital infrastructure, like the National Single Window Project I spoke about, like the immigration e-passport project, these are things that enable. Technology is an enabler. And help this economy to be energized in terms of delivering on our mandate.
“So, it’s been an interesting 100 days. We’ve focused on exports. We’ve focused on AfCTA.”
On collaboration, she said: “We have signed a MoU with the Aig Imoukhuede Foundation to digitize our Ministry’s processes. We also signed performance contract bond ahead of our signing of our new performance bonds with Mr. President.
“The CDCU has been tracking the ministry this is not a new thing, but if you check, you will see that in the last quarter of 2024 (Q4) our performance has already begun to improve because we’ve gotten very rigorous in how we’re doing our tracking.
“So, today and with this performance contract signing, what we did yesterday, it was a whole day of presentations, but it wasn’t just a talk show.
“Before the retreat, from last week, in fact, from a month, the Ministry Departments and Agencies (MDAs) first went through item 7 of the 8-point agenda, which speaks to industrialization and acceleration of diversification of the economy, and went through, first of all, their mandates, and then how does their mandate connect with item 7 of the 8-point agenda of President Bola Tinubu, and then, is it budgeted for?”
“A lot of the time, you have projects, and then you run into problems because it’s not budgeted for. So we asked them to link it to their budget, even before the signing of the Appropriation Act this year.”
“We know what we submitted to the National Assembly. So each project, we asked for their top game-changing projects. How much is budgeted for it? How does it fit into number 7 of the 8-point agenda? And how does it fit into our mandate? All this leads to impact.
“How will we deliver for over 200 million Nigerian people? How will it come into their lives? So this is why we have taken this very strategic approach. This is just 100 days and this is what 100 days looks like in days, months and years ahead.” She said.
