Vice President Yemi Osinbajo restated
the readiness of the Federal Government under the leadership of President
Muhammadu Buhari to partner with SMEs and local exporters to address some of the
bottlenecks and obstacles in their business, particularly access to finance.
He spoke with reporters today after
going round various exhibition stands at the on-going SME Conference 2016 in
Abuja.
The Vice President stressed that “one
of the things we’ve assured a lot of those exhibiting today is that we’re going
to be working with them day by day to see that they achieve all of their
objectives.”
Prof. Osinbajo went round the
exhibition stands in the company of the Minister of State for Industry, Trade
and Investment, Mrs Aisha Abubakar.
The SME Conference 2016 holding at
the Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Abuja is themed “Businesses and Franchises,” and
jointly hosted by the Nigerian-American Chambers of Commerce, Kaduna State
government, and the Embassy of the United States of America.
Below are the verbatim comments the Vice President made
while speaking with journalists after going round the exhibition stands:
“As far as I am concerned, this is very exciting. It is
very good see so many Nigerian entrepreneurs in agro-business and the sheer
creativity and all of what you are seeing here, the great enthusiasm. It is so
interesting to see so many people who are investing in agro-business, working hard
every day.
I have seen an incredible variety of agro- business
entrepreneurship here today and I am really excited about all these.
I think that one of the key things that we have seen are
some of the bottlenecks especially in financing some of these products and some
of what these people are doing.
And so we are looking at how to remove the bottlenecks in many of the situations that we see, so certainly we are going to be working on this.
Myself and the Hon. Minister of State for Industry, Trade
and Investment, we’ve been round and we’ve seen for ourselves some of what
needs to be done and one thing that we have assured a lot of those who are
exhibiting here today is that we are going to be working with them day-by-day
to see that they achieve all of their objectives.
One of the main objectives of course is that they will be able to export, they will be able to export in large quantities and we have an advantage now with the Naira situation, as a major export advantage.
One of the main objectives of course is that they will be able to export, they will be able to export in large quantities and we have an advantage now with the Naira situation, as a major export advantage.
So I think that we must take advantage of that and several
of these local producers are taking advantage (of the situation of the Naira)
and they are able to export at very competitive prices, so we are looking
forward to even bigger export levels … so I think what has happened here is
just incredible.”
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Politics
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