CALABAR- President Musa Yar’Adua has called on Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) to tackle the problem of mass unemployment in the country.
Yar’Adua made the call in Calabar while addressing the 10th Annual International Conference of Nigerian Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (NASME).
The President, who was represented by Mr. Latifu Salami, a Director in the Federal Ministry of Commerce and Industry, noted that the mass unemployment in the country was a index of economic stagnation.
He challenged the participants to fashion out ways of addressing unemployment in the country.
“The Nigerian economy has stagnated for sometime now and we have no choice but to tackle it head-long, so that history will record it in our favour,” Yar’Adua said.
He, nonetheless, stressed the need to provide an enabling environment for the development of SMEs to enable them to play their expected roles in the economic transformation of the country.
Yar’Adua urged the participants to come up with strategies that would open up new markets and linkages for the products and services of the country’s SMEs and thereby promote the creation of more jobs for the citizens.
In his address, Gov. Liyel Imoke of Cross River said that efforts were being made to
finance the creation of micro-credit windows in the state to support local entrepreneurs.
The governor said that indigenous entrepreneurs ought to be involved in efforts to transform the national economy.
The Chairman of NASME, Dr Ike Abugu, said that if Nigeria was to achieve the goals of the Vision 2020, it must urgently embark on a radical programme of empowering the local entrepreneurs.
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