▪︎Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr. Doris Uzoka-Anite
The Commerce and Industry Correspondents Association of Nigeria (CICAN) has enjoined the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr. Doris Uzoka-Anite, to let her impacts be felt on the sector.
In a statement from the Association’s Secretariat in Lagos, and signed by its President, Charles Okonji, CICAN urged the minister to hit the ground running by formulating policies that would revitalise the industrial sector.
CICAN urged the minister to first, review the performance and achievement of her immediate predecessor in order to identify the grey areas to work on.
Noting that one of the strongest variables determining the poor performance of the industrial sector is poor power supply, CICAN said: “If this problem remains unresolved, all the promises made by the government would remain an idle fancy and mere grandiloquence.”
Therefore, Uzoka-Anite must liaise with her counterpart in the Ministry of Power to address this challenge,” CICAN advised.
On made-in-Nigeria products, CICAN said locally-made products must be marketed abroad, and that to achieve this, the minister must reinvigorate the activities of the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) to enable it to project Nigerian products to the outside world.
“The minister should make this agency more proactive by overhauling its operations to enable it to function effectively. This is where cooperation with the organised private sector becomes imperative
“The minister should take a critical look at the quality of goods produced and exported out of Nigeria very seriously.
This is very important because the barometer for measuring the level of economic development and improvement in the quality of lives of the citizenry of a country is the quality and standards of goods and services produced and consumed in that country,” CICAN added.
The Association also called on the minister to sufficiently equip the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) to enable the body to enforce standards in the country.