More than two million Nigerian graduates are driven into the overcrowded labour market annually, Dr. Okechukwu Enelamah, Minister of Trade and Investment has stated.
Enelamah, speaking at the High-Level Policy Private Sector Trade and Investment Facilitation Partnership Forum in Abuja, Wednesday, said the federal government was committed to taking actions required to increase Nigeria’s share of global trade and Direct Foreign Investments to address the high unemployment rate.
He identified trade and investment as key to development, and stressed the need for African nations to stick together and jointly work to improve intra-African trade and investment, if the region must not lose out in global trade.
In a similar vein, Mr. Mukhisa Kituyi, Director General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, said “without integration, Africa’s development agenda will be a bad dream.”
Kituyi noted that many African countries charge higher tariffs on goods from sister African countries than they charge goods origination from other parts of the world, a situation, he said was a disincentive to intra-African trade.
In a message, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, billionaire businessman, challenged African countries to focus on manufacturing goods for domestic consumption and export, rather than exporting only raw materials to other regions of the world.
