Govt must co-create policies with private sector operators —ASBON
President, Association of Small Business Owners of Nigeria, ASBON, Dr Femi Egbesola has called on the federal government to work with the private sector to co-create policies to achieve economic growth.
He stated this at a panel session during the Vanguard Economic Discourse themed “Nigeria’s Economic Outlook 2025: Hardship and Pathways to Sustainable Recovery.”
He said: “Over the years, we have been advocating that government need to collaborate and engage particularly the private sector.
“It is important to engage stakeholders in monitoring policies, implementing policies, evaluating policies and that is the only way it can work.
“And it comes to policies, it should be ab-initio, from the beginning, so don’t just come out to regulate some sector of the economy, some sector of the private sector and leave others.
“In Nigeria, there are a lot of issues, it is not one size fits all, whereby one policy will work for everybody in the society.
As we speak today, if you look at the private sector, particularly the Small and Medium Enterprise, SME, sector, you discover that 86.5 percent of SME belong to the Nano sector.
“This is very key to economy because it is the largest part of the SME sector but the government is not focusing on the update, many of them are not even regulated.
“All the bulk of the regulations come from the less than 15 percent that lead the enterprise sector which is not really the best. If we really want to grow the economy and do not focus on this Nano sector, it will be difficult for us to be able to build them, group them and have small, medium sizes that will be able to grow the economy.
“For us, it is not just about coming up with policy, we also want the government to listen to us, support us, we want them to join hands with us in making their policies, without that, the story will always continue to be the same.
“For us we are very resilient, we are very adaptable, adaptability is in our DNA but even at that, resilience without strategic support system is not sustainable.
We need government to be able to build these structures, put institutions in place that can help us to drive policies.
“And policies are being made, we should be able to come back and evaluate the effectiveness of the policies and see if it is the same route to go next time.
“Let me give you an example, we have a number of intervention programmes that the Federal Government has done over the decades, from government to government. Ask yourself, what has been the impact of these intervention programmes on the SME sector.
“How many small business owner has been able to migrate to become medium size and big size enterprises over the years.
How many small business owners in the last ten years has been able to become Dangotes of today, you can hardly find one and that means there is a problem and the government needs to pay attention to and government cannot understand every sector without actually sitting down with the key stakeholders to know where the shoes pinch them and to find collective solutions to it. “Without that being done, we will be going round the same circles and we have gone round that circle enough.
This is a time for us to change, in the SME sector, we do not need pity. The government does not need to pity us, rather we need to work with them, we need to work together, and we need to be able to talk together. It is not only when they want to validate policies. And that is the only way we can work. “Nigerian SMES are ready to work, we are very resilient, we are innovative and we are ready to support the economy and that is the only way we can create jobs, that is the only way we can reduce poverty that is the only way we can grow the economy. So with collaboration, when it comes to government policy, it is key and government must begin to focus on bringing key stakeholders to make policies that work for each and every one of us if we must grow the economy.”
