Posted Wed, Jun 19, 2019 5:06 AM

NESG: Power, Education to drive economic change

The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), yesterday, presented its 2019 macroeconomic outlook for the year 2019.

According to the NESG, the power and education sectors were identified as major drivers of growth of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product, if well managed.

The unveiling of the report had in attendance operators from the private and public sector, in preparation for the NESG 2019.

Speaking in a chat, the Chairman, NESG Mr. Asue Ighodalo said: “Our coming summit is an extremely important one. It is going to be our 25th summit. We intend to come with a couple of major policy documentation, we intend to lookout for visioning documents for the country, which we hope government would pay attention to once we are ready with them.

“I think government needs to free our power sector a bit more. We need to get the right kind of private sector into our power sector. We need to look at the issue of rate in the power sector, so as to encourage more players to come into the sector.

“We need to work on our transmission. Generally, there are lots of work that need to be done in the power sector which we believe is one of the cardinals to grow our economy.

“But we have a lot that can encourage that work if the law is implemented. But we need to encourage the private sector deliberately to come into the power sector.

“And the regulators of the power sector must understand that they are regulating to develop the sector not to stifle it. That is very fundamental.

“The education sector too is equally very important in growing our economy. For me, every child from age five must be in school and they must be able to go to school to the extent of their abilities.

“What we are doing now is that, we have so many children who are out of school, and we don’t have the schools for them. There are a couple of states doing good things in the education sector. A state like Edo state where the teachers are being trained, and they go on to train the children.”

He added: “The way we are going, and the way the world is going, if we don’t pay serious attention to the education we require for the future, Nigeria will remain in the backward. We need to look at our vocational education, our technical education as well as our tertiary education.

“A lot of attention must be given to education. The two most important things for inclusive growth definitely are power and education. Then the third is health. Infrastructure also, but we can work with the private sector on infrastructure.”