industralise the country, create more jobs, increase productivity.
Prof. Adesoji Adesugba who said this during a media parley in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital said the Free Zones Scheme is the easiest means to achieve industrialisation and also remain competitive in the African Continental Free Trade Area, AfCFTA.
He noted that NEPZA contributes to the GDP of the country as it constantly collects payment for goods that enters the Nigerian market and collects income tax from people that work in the free zones.
According to him, ” It’s an economic activity that generates direct employment, as of now we have about 170,000 people employed in all our free zones, we have about 55 Free Zones in the country and about 30 of them functional, the others are either different stages of of development and some of them are yet to commence development, we also currently have 541 enterprises within these free zones.”
Prof. Adesugba explained that although successes have been recorded, more work has to be done to ensure the free Zones are made attractive to investors.
“In China the is Shanghai free zone alone has 55,000 factories and if you look at the population of China compared to Nigeria, we have about 1/5 of China, we haven’t started yet, we need to think out of the box and find out what are we doing right and what we are doing wrong.”
Speaking on efforts made by the Authority to promote industrialisation, NEPZA boss said the Authority has a system in place where it can use stock exchange to raise bonding for some of the companies coming to set up in the free zones which will be of benefit to Nigeria.
“We are also working with the Dubai Stock Exchange, the Nigerian Stock Exchange and the Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission to put together the rules within the law to be able to have a special listing of companies in the free Zone,” Prof. Adesugba explained.
He also disclosed that the authority is working with the Central Bank of Nigeria to get an approval for offshore banking process in the free zones.
“We negotiated with the committee, we’ve agreed on the way forward with this and we are waiting for the central bank to endorse this document so that we can have a vibrant, free zone scheme capable of being called competitive.”
The Managing Director added that the authority has created its online platform and hopes to launch it within 100 days in office of the President Tinubu’s administration.
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