Anya, Ekeh forecast Nigeria’s economic rebound

Although the Nigerian economy has sustained a downward profile in the last one year, experts have however, raised hope in the economy rebounding as fast as possible.

According to them, there is hope of huge potential growth for organizations that find creative ways to navigate the prevailing head winds.

These formed the thrust of the presentations at the Chief Executive Officer’s Forum organized by Technology Distributions (TD) Ltd in Lagos at the weekend.

The event with the theme: ‘The Economy and You: A Multi-dimensional Appraisal’ held at the headquarters of TD and had a rich panel of resource persons including the Chairman, Zinox Group, Leo Stan Ekeh; Chairman, Board of Technology Distributions, Prof. Anya O. Anya; Head of Sales, Global Markets (Nigeria), Stanbic IBTC, Yomi Balogun and Punfa Emelonye who represented the youthful population.

While delivering a paper titled – “The Economy and You: Tales of the unexpected”, Prof. Anya noted that one of the challenges being faced at the moment is how to restore confidence in the system, noting that this requires a multi-pronged approach.

Urging the participants to leverage on an understanding of the particular business environment they operate in, Prof. Anya harped on the importance of liquidity management as a vital tool for business sustenance in these trying times.

“It is obvious that one of the challenges to the economy is how to restore confidence in the system. Trust and confidence is the fundamental basis of all business transactions. We need to restore the confidence of business to invest in growth and innovation while the people will have their confidence restored to spend on their needs.

“What needs to be done has to be at two levels. There is the need at the social level to project a new message of inclusiveness in the effort to rebuild the economy and the nation. The projection will have to come from all levels but most importantly at the highest level of governance. The national symbol of power and authority must be seen engaging his people. At the economic level, there has to be a greater degree of projection of competence, expertise and empathy.

“There is work to do and that must involve all of us even as we project the message that the rewards will be equitably distributed to all without discrimination of ethnicity, gender or creed. The real change that Nigeria needs presently is the change in our mind-set and attitudes in both the leadership and the led such that the Nigerian narrative can change from the negative to the positive without boundaries.

“At the level of our business we need each other to put together a survival kit which must be built on understanding of our individual and corporate competence and on our knowledge and understanding of our particular business environment. We must out of the myriads of challenges construct our safety anchor. In doing this, we must remember that in this economy and in this time the most daunting challenge that will face all business however, big or however small is that of liquidity management. It is of the utmost necessity for each business to construct its own survival strategy to manage this threat.”

Also speaking Ekeh noted that since 2014, businesses in the ICT sector had borne huge pains with the exemption of the sub-sector from the list provided for in the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) foreign exchange issuance.

He, nevertheless, counselled participants to be strong and remain hopeful in the rebound of the economy.