Respite for businesses as FG moves to better operating environment

Nigeria is seeking to create an enabling business environment to attract the private sector and drive foreign direct investment into its economy.

This is as a result of its low ranking among the countries of the world on the ease of doing business, coupled with the dwindling fortunes of the nation’s economy as a result of the oil price crash.

Nigeria has maintained a backward position on the overall ranking on the ease of doing business, ranking 169 out 189 in 2016, according to World Bank rankings. Yearly movements in rankings have shown that Nigeria moved only one step upward from170 in 2015 to 169 in 2016.

But in an attempt to improve the nation’s business climate, President Muhammadu Buhari has pledged, at one of his visits to Qatar, “his commitment to this government is to remove all tollgates and roadblocks preventing businesses from reaching their full potentials.”

This was restated by Okechukwu Enelamah, minister of industry, trade and investment, at the 2016 KPMG alumni cocktail in Lagos recently. “That is what we mean by enabling environment. But people have to do their work; it doesn’t drop from the sky,” Enelamah, who is also an alumnus of the firm, said.

In his keynote address entitled, ‘Creating an enabling business environment in a challenging economic era,’ the minister said “the crisis facing Nigeria now actually makes the opportunity better, because everybody from the president, to the cabinet, to the people in the civil service is saying: what can we do?

“Nobody is pretending that life is normal, that things are going very well. Now is the question of what are the right policies, what are the right interventions that would be people centric?”

Improving the business climate and ease of doing business in Nigeria is a top priority of this government, he said, stating that his ministry has spent the last three months developing its vision. The vision, he explained, is built on four pillars, which include creating an enabling environment for industry, trade and investment in Nigeria; implementing the Nigeria industrial revolution plan; championing the course of Nigeria’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) as a means of creating jobs and achieving inclusive growth, and attracting foreign investments.

According to the World Bank, “Attractive business environment is critical for any country’s prosperity. A good investment climate fosters productive private investment, which is the engine for growth and poverty alleviation or reduction.”

Enabling business environment is said to exist when it is progressively easier to do business. It is characterised by low taxes, healthy public-private partnership, transparency, macroeconomic stability, and easier business registration and infrastructure availability, among others.