President Bola Tinubu has continued to put in place measures aimed at reshaping the economy of the country since assuming office in May 2023.
Chief Ajuri Ngelale, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, disclosed this to the News Agency of Nigeria on Tuesday in Abuja, on the anniversary of the administrations in office.
Ngelale said that the measures taken so far are legendary because they are what past governments refused to take and one that would ensure continuity and outlast the administration.
“Nigerians understand that this president, in his first days in office, dealt with the reform of the fuel subsidy regime, dealt with the reform of the financial markets, particularly with respect to the unification of the foreign exchange rates.
“He put an end to the type of incessant and really ravaging, round-tripping, we were seeing within the sphere of the Central Bank of Nigeria. But then again, of course, sometimes when you stop the bleeding, it’s not seen as an achievement.
‘’But there’s a reason many others refused to do what this president has now done. This is why the president has been roundly commended, not just locally but internationally for the reforms he has put in place,’’ he said.
The presidential adviser said Tinubu was not unaware of the impact of the reforms on the lives of the citizens and has embarked on a broad scope of economic intervention to alleviate the plight of the citizens.
He said one of such measures was the Medium, Small, and Micro Enterprises (MSME) interventions and capitalisation including the ₦200 billion for all segments of the business population operating in the country.
“Specifically, ₦50 billion in grants. These are not loans. This is not money our people will pay back, but ₦50 billion in grants being paid to over one million Nano businesses equitably distributed across all local government areas of the federation.
“Approximately 1,290 Nano businesses have been given ₦50,000 grant through that scheme per local government. In addition to that, you have the ₦150 billion in the form of single-digit interest rate loans being provided to hundreds of thousands of MSMEs across all states.
“Again, equitably distributed ₦75 billion is being given in loans of up to ₦1 million, whereas another ₦75 billion is being given to large-scale manufacturers. These are industries that are employing up to 1,000 Nigerians per industry.
“We are giving them loans, single digit interest rate, with a moratorium of about five years at about ₦1 billion each. So the interventions of business have been very important,’’ he added.
The presidential spokesman said Tinubu did not also leave out the development of infrastructure across the country in various sectors. He said that these investments were aimed at having a ripple effect among people who operate along the value chain segments of such infrastructures.
Ngelale explained that the past year has also seen significant interventions in the area of accelerating power performance, especially with the Siemens Energy agreement and others in the provision of off-grid power.
He said that Siemens was into the end-to-end modernisation of the nation’s power transmission grid to ensure enhanced quality and quantity of power supply to corporate and individual consumers.
“A situation in which disadvantaged Nigerians are losing their appliances, microwaves, television sets, refrigerators, freezers, because of this kind of equivocating power current. You recognise that this thing is actually costly to Nigerian families, and it has to be resolved.
“So sometimes you would even find that when you have this kind of equivocating power supply with the damage that it does to appliances and the like, and obviously the pocket of our people, what you end up finding is that they actually just want to turn the lights off.
“So Siemens deal with the issue of quality of supply, ensuring that when Nigerians receive their light, whether it’s 6 hours, 12 hours or 24 hours, that whatever they’re receiving is quality electricity supply,’’ he stated.
Ngelale added that the president has dedicated one billion dollars to off-grid power through capital formation and mobilisation from multilateral institutions dealing with the supply of off-grid solar home systems.
He said that this would be allocated to primary health facilities, rural communities, and rural farms to cut about 50% of post-harvest loss in the country because the produce could not reach the markets.
