Buhari Tasked on Digital Economy for National Development

Emma Okonji

Experts in information and communications technology (ICT) sector, the financial sector and management development sector, have urged the incoming administration led by Muhammadu Buhari, to leverage digital economy in his administration, describing it as a sine qua non for national development and in sustaining the Nigerian economy.

They spoke at the sixth Annual Pan-African 1:1 Investor Conference organised by Renaissance Capital in Lagos recently.

‘Digital Economy’ in technical parlance, implies an economy mainly driven by digital computing devices.

Managing Director, Smile Communications Nigeria Limited, Mr. Michiel Buitelaar, while speaking during a panel session, described Nigeria’s digital economy as huge, and will impact virtually all segments of the economy, if well harnessed.

“Thus, in the face of dwindling oil revenue with increasingly pressure on the economy evident in budgets deficit, infrastructural deficit, high unemployment rate, harsh business environment, corruption, among others, there is need for the incoming government to leverage digital economy in diversifying the Nigerian economy and in addressing the challenges,” Buitelaar said.

He identified infrastructural advancement as overriding factor for the immediate expansion of sectors such as agriculture, transportation, banking and finance, health-care/medicine, and education.

He said Smile Communications had already aligned itself with the key statistics expected for the Nigerian digital economy by 2018 as released by the Federal Ministry of Communications Technology, especially for the emergence of an industry that is less fragmented.

The federal government plans to attain 30 per cent broadband penetration by 2018 from the present less than 10 per cent.

Earlier, the Keynote speaker, Professor Pat Utomi, while addressing investors and captains of industries at the conference, shared similar views with Buitelaar.

He said thrust of the in-coming administration should be centered on making corruption costly and unattractive through public service entrepreneurship and goal oriented. He advised the incoming government to reinvent sectors like mining and building clusters of strong institutions, while leveraging ICT.

Global Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital, Mr. Charles Robertson, said: “We see great long-term potential across Africa, particularly, in Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt.”

We believe Nigeria will be a trillion dollar economy by 2025 and it will keep doubling in size every 10 years. GDP per capita is likely to reach around $15,000 by 2050. Following the April elections, the new government represents the best opportunity in recent years to push forward reform for Africa’s largest economy, Robertson said.

Ecobank Nigeria Limited at the weekend said it had secured and utilised a credit line under the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Export Credit Guarantee Program.

The program, according to the bank, provides credit guarantee to encourage commercial financing of US agricultural commodity exports, thereby assisting US exporters in making sales that might not otherwise occur.

The credit line under the US Government Export Guarantee Program is reserved exclusively for the export of agricultural products from the USA. It had facilitated increased trade of agricultural products between US exporters and Nigerian importers, according to a statement from the bank.

Furthermore, it explained that it provided an avenue for competitively priced financing for longer tenors to both exporters and importers, provides the exporter guaranteed payment and enables