Reduce energy prices to boost economic productivity, Duke tells FG

By Abubakar Yunusa

Former Cross River Governor, Donald Duke, has urged the Federal Government to reduce soaring energy prices to bolster economic productivity.
He was a guest on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a socio-political programme aired on Channels Television on Friday.
Duke knocked President Bola Tinubu’s administration over the “fundamental error” of removing subsidies on petrol and electricity for almost the same period.
“What we are doing to our people is just not sustainable. We’ve got to revisit all those policies and put our people first. And this is not (about) subsidy, this is about enhancing the productivity of our people.
“If you reduce energy prices and people become more productive, the economy will grow even further,” he said.
According to him, four factors affect inflation in Nigeria: high energy costs, over-inflated contracts, ill-distribution of wealth and high interest rates.
“We need to get the economy working for the people. That’s the bottom line. At the end of the day, people don’t care about how they are governed as much as they care about bread and butter.
“The function of a government is to ensure the productivity of its citizens within an orderly environment. If you look at the unemployment ratio of our country, we are largely unproductive; the dependency ratio is high.”
Duke said productivity determines the stability of any nation and the current administration should do all to power industrialisation to reverse the import-dependent status of Nigeria.
“Over 60% of the pressure on our foreign exchange earnings is oil import, if you can domesticate that, the exchange rate will dramatically drop.
“Even beyond that, we need to question the things we import. We are running an import-dependent economy which is wrong. With 230 million people growing every year, we need to run a productive, manufacturing, agrarian economy. We are not doing that. We, literally import everything at the expense of our people,” he said.
Duke, who was governor of the South-South state from May 1999 to May 2007, said skyrocketing energy prices have battered the economy and have been forcing international manufacturing companies to exit Nigeria.
He said oil and gas prices should not be measured internationally, to the detriment of local industries. Duke opined that energy prices should be domesticated for local refineries and industries.
“A lot of companies are leaving Nigeria today because of the cost of production and the exchange rate,” he said.
As Nigeria battles its current economic crisis sparked by the government’s twin policies of petrol subsidy removal and unification of forex windows, some manufacturing companies have exited the country in the last few months, the latest being manufacturers of Huggies and Kotex brands of diapers, Kimberly-Clark.
Other multinationals who exited Nigeria in the last year are US-based Procter and Gamble (P&G), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Unilever, and Sanofi-Aventi Nigeria, amongst others.

Some similar reasons given by the companies include high energy costs and currency depreciation.