Shonekan commissions new NESG headquarters, lauds group’s achievements

The Summit House’, new purpose-built headquarters of the National Economic Summit Group (NESG), was on Thursday formally commissioned by Ernest Shonekan, former head of state, who led three other founding fathers of the group in an emotional return to witness the grand opening of the NESG head office.

Shonekan, who as head of Nigeria’s interim national government (ING), convened the first Economic Summit in 1993 led Phillip Asiodu, Dick Kramer and Pascal Dozie in providing an atmosphere of nostalgia about the past and concerns about how there is so much work left to be done to bring Nigeria to its desired place among the comity of nations.

The former head of state recalled the work done by different groups of leading businessmen concerned about the need to properly empower the private sector to play its role in the nation’s development and how the summit process became a common vehicle for these groups to amplify their clamour for public private sector dialogue for the common good.

“We had to do something by way of leaving a legacy behind because back then there was a lot of mutual suspicion between the public and private sectors so that we can team up to solve national issues,” Shonekan recalled in his speech at the commissioning in reference to the first summit he convened in 1993.

In assessing the group’s achievement, Shonekan stated: “So far, so good but we could have done better.”

He added that the goal of the group was “to serve as an advocacy group to advise government on ways to move the country forward,” and that in his assessment of the group’s achievements, “most of the recommendations of that first summit are still valid today.”

Dozie, who was cited for his role as the first chairman of the Summit Group, spoke of the concept of work tables in a country where the gathering of society’s bigwigs is incomplete without the high table.

“We simply had work tables and never high tables,” said Dozie, who also hinted at the behind-the-scene manoeuvres aimed at taking the military back to the barracks. He added that the NESG was “a child of circumstances.”

Kramer in his comments said whereas it was good to celebrate, the nation faced perhaps some of her most challenging days ahead with the world’s oil market sinking under the weight of oversupply from shale in the United States.

Asiodu, an elder-statesman, said he was saddened by the state of the nation and the under-performance of the government at these critical time. He called the attention of the audience to the devastating impact of the rising Boko Haram insurgency in parts of Nigeria and the seemingly helplessness of the nation’s armed forces.

He also warned against what he termed “executive greed” among the public sector executives that has seen their budget escalate at an alarming rate, stating that the nation was on the brinks of possible economic disaster unless something urgent was done to arrest the slide.

Asiodu described the insurgency and the poor response to it as evidence of Nigeria’s governance challenge and made an even more striking point about 8how the budget for the legislature rose from a mere N19 billion to almost N200 billion over the years.

In his remarks, Abubakar Olanrewaju Sulaiman, the minister of National Planning Commission (NPC), who was represented by Bassey Akpayung, acting secretary of the commission, pointed out that the commissioning of The Summit House signified the transformation of NESG from infancy to adulthood.

Also present at the commissioning were Tony Elumelu, chairman, Heirs Holdings; Phillips Oduoza, GMD/CEO, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc; Frank Aigbogun, publisher/CEO, BusinessDay, among others.