Nigeria’s Northern States Governors Forum has to come up with a way of attracting at least $10bn worth of FDI and creating about 20m jobs across the 19 states annually

Ayo Akinfe

(1) No matter how you cut it, the main responsibility for getting Nigeria out of her current economic morass lies with the Northern State Governors Forum (NSGF). It is not the federal government that is going to create local jobs, it is the state governments and I believe we need to keep up the pressure on the NSGF. We should demand monthly updates from them on how many jobs they have created. It is no accident that these 19 states are churning out bandits, kidnappers, terrorists, etc in their hundreds on a daily basis

(2) Do you know that Nigeria’s population is growing at a rate of 2.6% annually. This means that we need to create 5.2m jobs every year just to remain stagnant and not suffer negative growth. We are not even creating 1.2m jobs a year so it is no surprise that poverty is having a field day in Nigeria. We all know what part of the country is most badly affected

(3) According to the Brookings Institute,
Africa needs to create between 12m and 15m jobs annually to absorb youth entering the labor market. I am not aware of any programme in place to realise this, so it is time for Africans to spell out the dangers to the rest of the world. They either invest in Africa and create jobs or be prepared to live with another Afghanistan. I find it totally unacceptable for instance that there is no African coronavirus vaccine production plan in place for instance

(4) To combat this pandemic, we need vaccines, medical equipment, personnel protection equipment, oxygen cylinders, ventilators, syringes, bedding, hospital uniforms, etc. I am not aware of one major manufacturing facility producing any of these on the African continent

(5) Just imagine the number of jobs we would have created across our continent if we had say three major manufacturing facilities at each end of Africa. Maybe a pharmaceutical plant in Egypt, a ventilator factory in Nigeria and a hospital clothing manufacturing facility in South Africa

(6) In the case of Nigeria, we are sitting on a particularly explosive time bomb because 80m Nigerians live below the poverty line, we year the highest number of Internet refugees on the planet and the country has 13m out-of-school children. We are not the poverty capital of the world by accident. Our problem is we have no strategy to get out of this quagmire

(7) To make matters worse, in Nigeria, the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) is very lopsided. About 71% of all FDI in Nigeria goes into Lagos State. This is there the NSGF needs to step up its game big time and set itself a 2021 target of the 19 states at least matching Lagos in terms of attracting inward investment

(8) Just to give you an example, before the pandemic struck, during the second quarter of 2019, Lagos State attracted $4.13bn worth of foreign investment. I want the NSGF to ringfence about 10 key sectors where they will attract $4bn worth of FDI during the third quarter of 2021

(9) When I look at animal husbandry, food processing, cash crop production, power generation, horticulture, textile processing, leather tanneries, dairy products, machine tool manufacturing, automobile/motorcycle/bicycle assembly etc, I see immense opportunities on the horizon

(10) As a first step, the NSGF has to get its states to rescind Sharia law as this is a big turn off to investors. It is no accident that the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and even Saudi Arabia are all repealing their strict Sharia laws in a bid to woo investors