The Executive Director, Nigeria Export Promotion Council (NEPC), David Adulugba, has disclosed that Nigeria’s exportable products currently generates $10 billion yearly. The NEPC boss, who listed the exportable resources to include cashew, cocoa, sesame seeds and special leathers (finished ones) reiterated that manufacturing products in the country are also doing well in the export market.
Adulugba made this disclosure on Wednesday at the commissioning of the N11 million data centre built for the council by Skyward Research and consulting Ltd.
According to him, President Goodluck Jonathan made reference to the positive contributions of the country’s exportations to economic growth in the 2012 Budget presented on Tuesday, stressing that the report from the International Trade Development Centre in Geneva also corroborated Nigeria’s contributions to the world economy and efforts put up to become competitive in the global market.
“As I speak to you and, according to the International Trade Development Centre in Geneva, Nigeria’s exportation currently hits $10 billion yearly, and this has positioned Nigeria as one of the leading emerging economy in the world.“At NEPC, we are doubling our efforts to ensure that we increase the figure by the end of this year,” he stated.
Despite this, the NEPC executive director hinted that some challenges include failing infrastructure, paucity of funds to develop products, cost of production, which is very high in Nigeria, checkpoints and border harassments, sea piracy, among others, are things plaguing the sector in the country. According to him, NEPC is trying as much as possible to diversify the economy: “The oil economy is a mono base economy. Nigeria can do well without oil. The oil economy has not done well and except we make stringent effort to diversify the economy by developing the non oil sector, we may not compete well in the global economy.”
On the N11 million data centre launched, Adulugba said with the transformation brought about by Information Technology, not only in Nigeria, but globally, NEPC can’t be allowed to left behind, “we must go digital in export processing.” He explained that Data collection, collation, storage and retrieval is a system that must be embedded in the NEPC operations, “though, it is coming rather too late, but we must join the global train and ensure we are not left behind. Quality and accurate service delivery is very germane to our business, therefore going digital is not just imperative but highly critical attaining our goals.
“NEPC is not a place for dead woods, but brainy, enterprising and goal getters for transformation.”
On his part, the Managing Director of Skyward Research and Consulting Ltd, Mr. Ike Abugu, noted that prior to the assumption of office of Adulugba as the Executive Director of NEPC, there was not much computerization that had been done at NEPC, “we have literally had to start from the scratch.”
Abugu said with the commissioning of the data centre, NEPC will be able to regularizes access to the Council’s documents; converts the Council’s hard documents into electronic format; improves the security of documents and records. Abugu, however, said in case of any unfortunate incidence, there is a disaster recovery strategy put in place by the firm.
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