PROPERTY TRANSACTION GUIDE

Importation of cement does not make sense - Minister
By Ademola Oni, Abeokuta

Punch, Monday 12th July 2010

The Minister of State for Finance, Mr. Remi Babalola, has said a situation where Nigeria continues to import cement, despite the abundant limestone deposit in the country, "does not make sense."

Babalola, who spoke with newsmen in Abeokuta on Thursday, believed that Nigeria should be in a position to export cement to other African countries by now if the country had been able to put its acts together in terms of infrastructure and the right policy support for different sectors of the economy.

The minister, who was among the guests at the inauguration of the 1.2milion metric tonnes quarry plant of Multiverse Plc along with the Minister of Mine and Steel Development, Alhaji Mohammed Sada, declared that what the nation needed to do was to open up the economic environment for the private sector to thrive.

Babalola contended that the mining industry could be liberalised in such a way that it would significantly contribute to the annual Gross Domestic Product of the nation as the turnover of the telecommunications companies was beginning to outgrow the turnover in the manufacturing companies.

He said, "Why on earth should we at this point be importing cement? It doesn‘t make any sense, whatsoever. What we should be doing at this point in time is that we should be exporting cement to other African countries. We have some challenges in the area of power generation but some measures are already being put in place to address this.

"What we should consider should be holistic, the whole gamut of the economy; not just in the mining sector. It is about restructuring the economy. What the Federal Government has been doing with Vision 2020 is to reconstruct, restructure and change the architectural platform of the Nigerian economy, so that we move away from the mono-cultural perspective, whereby what we are dealing with is oil and gas. We should open up the whole of the economic atmosphere in such a way that it will be conducive for the private investors like Multiverse to be able to participate and move the economy to another level.

"So, what we are doing is to open up the economy like what we have witnessed in the telecommunications sector, where the turnover is beginning to outshoot that of the manufacturing sector. How old is the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector and you can see that the manufacturing industries had been there even before independence."

Babalola reasoned that the Federal Government was not interested in running such businesses but concerned with freeing the system for the private sector to operate and bring out the best in the system.

The minister believed that the nation‘s GDP could hit $900bn if the restructuring process was achieved, especially with the liberation of the mining sector, which he said had been underutilised.

"My coming here (Quarry) today is a testimony of the importance we attach to things like this. How many companies like this do you have in Nigeria today, listed on the Stock Exchange? The mine and steel have the capacity to transform the economy significantly. What we should do is to take some sectors like this and allow the private sector to come in. If we do this, we should be exporting cement, exporting rice and other products," he said.

Babalola added that the government would give policy support and policy focus to different parts of the economy, saying an Act was already in place in the mining sector, which would be energised so that the active private players could be allowed to flourish.