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Nigeria’s Executive and legislature on Tuesday agreed on a 60-day timeline for the passage of specific bills targeted at improving the ease of doing business in the country.
The agreement was reached at the expanded meeting of the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council yesterday, chaired by Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo with Senate President Bukola Sakari and Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara in attendance.
This is as the legislature assured that it will speedily ensure the passage of the Credit Bureau Bill and Collateral Transactions Security Bill, which they say are critical to the ease of doing business in the country.
At it’s sixth meeting which held at the Presidential Villa, the Council approved a national action plan to be implemented across its three priority areas – Entry and Exit of goods; Entry and Exit of people and Government Transparency and Procurement – over the next 60 days to deliver tangible changes for SMEs in Nigeria.
The reforms is expected to improve Nigeria’s rankings in the World Bank Doing Business Index 2018. Nigeria ranked 169th position out of 190 countries in on its Ease of Doing Business index for 2017.
Addressing newsmen at the end of the meeting which lasted about four hours, Osinbajo said the Whole idea of having the Senate President and the Speaker present is to be able to work together to improve business environment in Nigeria.
“We have looked at three broad areas that we are trying to improve ease of doing business. There are: Entry and exit of goods, entry and exit of persons into Nigeria and the whole general transparency and efficiency in government agencies and parastatals. Of course the whole idea is to provide an environment for those who want to do business (both local and foreign) in Nigeria.
“A lot of work has already been done, there are pieces of legislation that we are also looking forward to seeing and we have been working with the National Assembly to ensure that these pieces of legislation are passed. Of course there are some improvements which we expect to see at our ports, airports, seaports, Immigrations, granting of visas
and those kinds of things.
“We have set timelines for ourselves to ensure that we are not just speaking about these things without necessarily tying ourselves down to specific timelines. So we are looking forward to an improved business environment in the shortest possible time”, he said.
Saraki on his part said their presence as part of the expanded meeting of the business environment council was to emphasis the importance of the meeting which he described as a very good initiative.
According to him, “Some of the issues about addressing business environment are addressed to policies but there are some that need legislation and we have been talking about what is our own responsibility there. We have taken away today some of the bills that we need to address particularly looking at access to credit, credit bureau, transactions, a lot of SMEs that don’t have fix assets, we need to see how it can be addressed so that they can have access to credit. These are some of the bills we need to pass in order to improve the business environment.
“I think meeting and working together with the executive will make it much easier, this is a strong message for investors out there who are coming in and we have given ourselves timelines. We have been given 60 days for some specific bills to be passed and we hope and promised that we will do that on our own part. Is a good initiative and it will
go along way to improve business environment”.
Saraki later told newsmen that the National Assembly will get down to business to ensure that two bills particularly, the Credit Bureau Bill and Collateral Transactions Security are passed as soon as possible.
On whether it does not amount to the executive impugning on the independence of the legislature when they have been asked to pass some bills within 60 days, the Senate President replied, “No no no. Whether executive or legislature we are all working for one government and for our people. You see, they are already doing things that we are already doing but this is to ensure there is no duplication. We are all setting for ourselves deadlines some of them have already been passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives but there are some they (executive) are interested in which we also have interest in. We are not fighting here”.
On efforts by National Assembly to pass enabling laws to ensure steady power supply, Saraki said, “The issue of power supply goes beyond enabling law, there are a lot of factors that goes into that. You know we held a summit which was initiated by National Assembly with all stakeholders in the power sector, looking at distribution, generation.
The problems are enormous, we have talked about that and we are waiting for the technical report to come, and then there will be a meeting with the minister and then we will begin to address that and then we will begin to see result. We did mention at that summit that we were at a crisis and we need to come out with some things. Things were done wrongly in the past but we cannot continue to cry over that we need to come up with some solutions and we will come up with those solutions”.
