Dr. Doris Uzoka-Anite is the Minister of Industry, Trade, And Investment. She recently briefed the Federal Executive Council (FEC), presided by President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Villa on several trade negotiations and support from multilateral groups tailored towards enhancing the business environment and attracting huge Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), to boost the country’s economy. Newsqueet brings the excerpts;
I presented reports on some of the activities of my ministry in the last two weeks. As you will recall, I represented Nigeria at the change Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Center (WTO), at Abu Dhabi, and there we discussed a lot of issues.
Nigeria participated in a lot of the discussions and negotiations that were ongoing. Discussions around fishery subsidies. A special public stockholding, special differential treatment, ecommerce moratorium, international development facility for developing countries and many other negotiation areas.
The World Trade Organization is actually a 166 member organization. The discussions and negotiations are still ongoing and we were able to secure an extension of the E-commerce moratorium and also we were able to get some extension for agriculture negotiation. So, we have the text for agriculture negotiation, and that is actually the first in 16 years.
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And apart from the MC 13, we had a lot of sideline meetings. And one of the most fruitful one was a discussion and the meeting we had with the Director General (DG) of the WTO and that culminated in the WTO giving us a lot of support.
And just yesterday, the DG of the WTO came to Nigeria to launch the programmess of areas of support from the WTO and ITC, to the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment in support of the president Bola Tinubu administration. One pertinent thing to note at that support is the fact that having gone through the initiatives that we presented for the achievement of the President’s 8 point agenda, they actually approved a lot of them and were very excited to support Nigeria with both technical assistance and financial assistance.
In addition to the WTO and ITC supporting, they also mobilised donor agencies like the World Bank, and other development agencies, embassies, AFREXIM, AfDB, IFC, all of them were there to support show participation.
There are seven areas of support that the WTO gave us yesterday. One is on the standard trade development facility. The facility actually helps to reduce the amount of agricultural export rejects. A number of you have been asking, how do we reduce the amount of rejects coming out from Nigeria especially? This is the second time the WTO will be giving Nigeria that sort of support.
What it does is, it helps us to improve the standards of the exports and in line with the sanitary and phytosanitary standards.
Saniotory and phytosanitary standards actually speaks to both organic and inorganic residues or contaminants of food products. Organic is where you’re talking about weevils and pests. While inorganic is like the chemical components where you see those chemical components in pesticides and fertilizers and herbicides. So, this will help the farmers train them in how to farm and how to store their products, package it and produce it to standard that will be acceptable to the countries where we’re exporting to. The first support we got from WTO on this area was in the area of shea butter. And with that support the women that were exporting the shea butter saw an increase in their income by about 300%.
And so its help them to remove stones, smell, packaging, making it look nicer. So it made it more acceptable to the importing countries. So we are going to see that support coming into cowpeas and sesame. Cowpea is more important for us because it supports the food security agenda of Mr. President. So, we are going to see more support for cowpea and sesame.That will increase the amount of exports and hopefully increase the amount of investments that will go in into this area. And when that happens, we’ll see more inflow of foreign exchange coming from just this alone.
The statistics we have for both cowpea and sesame is over $9bn worth of trade that happens from Nigeria alone. So, we should see us trapping that sort of amount coming back to Nigeria most of those trades are lost because we get to Japan as one of the largest importers of sesame and they are rejecting our sesame because it’s not meeting up to their standards.
So, this is going to help us to remove the impediment and see an increase of inflow coming and with that there’s more job creation, people go back to farm, then incentivized. They’re happy because they’re producing what people are buying. And there is no greater joy in dignity of labour when you’re producing what people really want and they’re buying it.
The second area of support we’re getting is in the area of digital trade. The WTO is partnering with World Bank to give us support in digital trade. That includes hard infrastructure, that’s the fiber optic connectivity and soft infrastructure, software platforms and all of that. This will help us to improve e-commerce trading for MSMEs.
You know, the future of trade is digital. And if we can get our MSMEs our manufacturers and intrapreneurs to sell more through e-commerce platforms. It increases their reach, improves market access and improves their productivity. We are partnering with the Ministry of Communication, Innovation and Digital Economy to roll out this. This is actually a $1bn facility by the World Bank given to nine countries and the WTO was able to accede to our request to participate in the rollout.
The third area of support coming from the WTO is in the area of developing the trade intelligence unit within the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. The trade intelligence unit is actually a nexus to collect data and information on everything trade, manufacturing the economy, economic activities that are going on in the country, locally and globally. So it helps us to actually harness information, analyse the information and be able to predict global market trends.
When you are able to predict global macro trends. It helps you to make informed decisions, formulate policies and help you to focus on areas of comparative advantage that gives you the opportunity to actually scale or develop faster. And that improves our economic diversification, and inflow of foreign investments. We are also getting support for cotton development. The Cotton Belt has written us a lot of disinvestment over the years.
The support we’re getting from the WTO will help the cotton farmers to farm more, farm better quality products and be able to participate in the sports apparel market. Now you recall at the WTO MC 13 event, WTO has signed an agreement with FIFA to support the cotton countries. So Nigeria is going to participate in that agreement.
The cotton apparel is a $270bn industry. Nigeria participating in the agreement helps the cotton farmers to farm more and improve their income and of course create jobs, reduce security in that Cotton Belt. So we’re really optimistic and looking forward to this.
We got support for women entrepreneurship, with the development of the women enterpreneurship fund. It is a $50m facility. Nigeria will be participating with other African countries, and it’s open to women especially to improve the entrepreneurship activities and help them to export more.
We got support for custom valuation training and on trade related aspects of intellectual property. We are developing our intellectual property and we’re going to be reforming that. So this is coming at a very auspicious time to support the IP process and IP laws of Nigeria to improve our investments in a non-physical or service related investments. So all of these supports are coming because they believe in the administration of the President.
They believe in his vision. And they said it clearly that the reforms that we’re putting out, yes may take some time, but that’s the right way. And that is the right direction of travel. So all of these supports are coming both technically and financially to give us the boost to make sure that we achieve this when we get all of this support, the achievement of attaining a N1tn economy is within our reach. So we’re really excited and very thankful and grateful to the President for his bold leadership, for his direction and for the WTO and the donor agencies who came together to give us this support.
