Nigeria’s economy beset by several challenges – Gov Okowa

The Peoples Democracy Party (PDP) vice-presidential candidate, Ifeanyi Okowa, said on Sunday that Nigeria’s economy was beset by several problems.

Okowa, who spoke at a presidential town hall meeting organized by Arise TV, said the problems cut across various sectors, including the oil industry, agriculture, and manufacturing, amongst others.

The Delta State governor also blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the nation’s economic challenges.

He said: “There are so many issues wrong with our economy as of today. First, unfortunately for us as a country, we have continued to depend on oil.

“Even the gas, we are not developing the gas component enough. We are still dealing with associated gas. All our natural gas in several trillions of cubic we’ve not touched anything.

“And that is an asset that can lift us up from where we are. So we need to rethink our process. So once we have shocks in the oil industry, there’s a problem.

“COVID-19 came and we are in trouble. The oil price has gone up now and when we suppose to reap gains, because we are not refining, we are now in trouble also.

READ ALSO: Nigeria’s economy diversified, but non-oil sectors unproductive – Peter Obi

“So the whole thing is totally wrong. Unfortunately, we are not developing the manufacturing sector and we are not doing well in the agricultural sector. Therefore, everything is going definitely wrong. We need to rethink all these, and that is already well documented in our manifesto to Nigerians.”

He, however, proffered solutions to the challenges in the agricultural sector.

Okowa added: “We need to recreate the agricultural sector in a way that it works, we need to be very sure that we are able to modernise our agriculture, even when we try to bring the private sector to do commercial farming.

“We must also sit down with them to ensure that the out-growers schemes are tied to their agro-production and agro-processing. Those things are important to uplift every Nigerian.”

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