President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday in Abuja declared open the 21st National Economic Summit with a call on private and public organisations to work closely toward the country’s economic development.

Buahari, who was represented by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, said that the task of nation-building was a shared responsibility.

“The task of nation building is a shared responsibility.

“The more substantial requirements for development today is in terms of knowledge, human resources, and capital and all of these actually lie outside of formal government structures.

“No meaningful economic or social change is possible without the active partnership of the private sector, which actively includes civil society.’’

The President said that he was personally looking forward to the outcomes of this summit.

“Something tells me that it could have many of the answers that we need for to win for our people and country in these very interesting times ahead.”

Buhari said it was gratifying that since1993, the annual Nigerian Economic Summit (NES), had been organised by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) in collaboration with the National Planning Commission (NPC) as a public-private partnership initiative.

He said that the summit remained the foremost Nigerian forum, “which brings together the public and private sectors to interact, share thoughts, and build consensus on policy options and implementation frameworks for our country.”

The President, therefore, commended the group for being steadfast and consistent in creating the discussion forum, which he described as “the coming of age summit.”

According to the President, the summit theme: ‘Tough Choices: Achieving Competitiveness, Inclusive Growth, and Sustainability’ is as apt as “adulthood always comes with huge and

complex responsibilities.”

He said that the theme highlighted the challenges and paradoxes that defined the nation’s economic and social circumstances today.

“We are at a time of monumental challenges and tough choices but also a time of incredible opportunities for achieving competitiveness, inclusive growth and sustainability.

“We, as a government, are called upon to make tough choices in exchange control restrictions, altering the absurd recurrent to capital expenditure ratio, reducing the deficit and reducing the overall size of governance.

“We are called upon to clean up the mess and rebuild the institutions that corruption has ravaged over the years.”

The President observed that terrorism in the North East in the past six years had given rise to huge socio-economic problems, thus stalling the local economy and the education of millions of children in many parts of the country.

He said that the tragedy of thousands of orphaned children posed huge social challenges while the cost of rehabilitation of damaged infrastructure and homes was huge.

“To effectively compete for international and even local investment we need to improve our position on the ease of doing business indexes.

“This calls for both radical improvements in bureaucratic delays in obtaining pre-investment processes and also substantial investment in infrastructure, especially power, roads and technology.

“But as we take the tough macro and micro decisions for accelerated growth, we are compelled to redress the paradox of high growth figures and widening inequality, rising unemployment and poverty.

“It is evident that any economic model that leaves nearly half of the citizenry behind requires rethinking.

“This is why our economic model would involve substantial social investments over the next three years.” (NAN)

•Photo shows President Buhari.

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