The Deputy Minority leader, house of representatives, Hon. Toby Okechukwu have asked that the government looks past oil as its major source of revenue in the economy and look towards diversifying the economy through robust micro, small and medium enterprises.
He made this call after the presentation of the 2022 budget by President Muhammadu Buhari titled; ‘Budget of economic growth and sustenability’ where he pointed out the alarming difference between the previous and the present budget.
Speaking with UGAMATV on steps which the government needed to lay down in order to boost the economy through small and medium scale enterprises, he said that this was to enable us come out of the struggle we are having in our economy, stating that the cause of the challenges was due to the fact that the economy is not being properly managed.
“We have a lot of volume of naira, 16 trillion, but in 2014 we had 4.8 trillion budget. In 2021/22 we are proposing 16 trillion budget if you divide it by the pre-existing exchange rate, 16 trillion will be 39 billion dollars. 4.8 trillion in 2018 was 40 billion dollars, meaning that we have greater volume of naira, but the value has declined. So its almost like no motion, no movement.
“The expectation is that there should be some stability in the fiscal policy measures of government. There should be some focus, there must be some steadfastness to enable private companies and enterprises to survive. There has to be some reliability regarding the economic policies we pursue” he said.
Stressing that the future of the country depended on small scale businesses, he added that “Now that we are focusing only on oil, it is getting out of fashion, so we need to go back to manufacturing. But for it to be successful, the economy has to be stable”.
Speaking on the high taxation demanded from manufacturers which they see as they challenge, he stated that high taxation was not the major challenge of manufacturers, “it’s the environment they operate in that is the challenge, because you can only pay tax when you make profit.
When you don’t make profit you cant pay tax, but this companies are often ran within a challenging environment and they are not even guarranted production. If you check in the past we used to have Niger Steel, we used to have the vegetable oil refinery in Nachi, we also used to have manufacturing companies but now they are all gone, because the operating environment is challenging.
“People just like to trade now or maybe import and this is not how a country grows. So the government need to create an enabling environment and stable environment for manufacturers to make progress”, he concluded
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