Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, has said that reforms by his government to rejig the State’s economy, support investment inflow and guarantee an enabling environment for business growth led to the growth of the state’s economy from about $10 billion to over $26 billion in the last seven and a half years.
Speaking to journalists in Benin City, the governor explained that the reforms cut across various sectors of the state’s economy, including agriculture, culture and tourism, entertainment, and energy, among others.
He said: “When I assumed office, in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the economy was about $10.6 billion, but today, at the last count, it is about $26 billion. We have doubled tremendously. The question is, what has led to this?
“We have been able to attract substantial investments and investors by just creating the enabling business environment. Today, the main contributor to our GDP is agriculture. What have we done with agriculture? We looked around and said, where do we have the competitive advantage?
“We are the home of oil palm, so we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves what to do with this asset. We went to Malaysia and everywhere else and decided to start a programme to develop our oil palm. Even though we had Okomu and Presco here, the two largest agric companies quoted on the stock exchange, let’s do more; let’s double the acres under cultivation.
“So, we set up an oil palm programme, not just allocating lands. It’s a programme where we decided to provide a certain amount of land for the cultivation of oil palm, because oil palm is a very prolific crop; there is no waste. So, we did it in two phases. In the first phase, we did a forest audit.”
Obaseki disclosed that the state government identified degraded forest lands that will never be able to grow back as forest, took that and got over 120,000 hectares of such and began to prepare them for oil palm cultivation.
