Going by figures being bandied across the globe the -6% contraction of the ecomy recorded in Nigeria compared favorably with the 20% recorded in the UK and the percentage in the US is even twice that. The second largest economy in Africa, South Africa is ecpecting anything in the range of 20% - 50%. But the economy like politics is local and we can only be judged by the impact on the common everyday Nigerian.

I think it is too early to say whether we have succeeded in turning the pandemic into an opportunity but I must say the pandemic itself presents an opportunity and we, as a government have seen it as such,it is an opportunity to do so many different things. First of all, even just in scaling up our medical response and our capacity to be able to respond to pandemics now in the future.

As you know we know we use to have 4 modular laboratories, now we have 64. We have lab capacity for far more ICU beds, about 300, several other bed spaces and hospital capacity which is considerably high today but we also in terms of improving capacity on the medical side alone. you will see that at a point we were worried about just the capacity to provide oxygen, now, we have several facilities for oxygen and even oxygen production in Nigeria and we are able to do much more even with our capacities in the hospitals.

We now have about 7,190 beds, we have about 20,000 health workers that have been trained on infections and control. We have over 4,000 oxygen delivery equipment and accessories nationwide and we also been able to provide a minimum of a billion naira to each state just to improve their capacity. Lagos State alone had about 10 billion. So just in terms of improving medical capacities, a lot have happened but that’s in the medical or healthcare side.

On the economic side, talking about the Economic Sustainability Plan, this has provided yet again another opportunity for some of the serious concerns that we have on the economy. I think for us as a government, one of the key worries that we had was more for how this will affect jobs. Job production and job sustenance and I think that what we saw was a problem, a very big problem with the informal workers and people who had to work day to day for their survival and what we tended to see there was that people like; tailors, artisans, event planners, decorators, makeup artists, hairdressers, barbers, printers, souvenirs dealers etc were in trouble.

We needed to address the concerns that they had and because these people depended on an ecosystem that had collapsed with the COVID19 pandemic and that asides the big industries like the hospitality industry, of course occupancy rate in hotels to 10%. Even private hospitals experienced problems because people avoided private hospitals and the same as aviation and we know all the problems associated with that. Of course we are concerned about those holding these jobs which is why we put in place what we described as a survival fund which will cater for artisans, 42,000 across the state for a start and that will be in the form of support for artisans, we also have a pay roll support scheme which will support person especially private school teachers for example and then small businesses who employ up to and not more than 50 percent persons.

At the moment we are at the process of compiling that data and the criteria has been set already. That committee is headed by the minister of state for trade and investment and the vice chair is Mrs Ibukun Awosika the Chairperson of first bank. So they are basically looking at the criteria for giving out this pay roll support and also other support scheme that we have.

So by and large we are tackling those issues, we are also looking at the bigger issues like how will we support aviation, the hospitality industry and these are big areas where we are looking for support. The first place, you are probably aware that the CBN has already put in place several mechanisms for ensuring that loans that have been taken by companies and by some of these big enterprises that I just mentioned that there is some succor for them in the form of restructuring of their loans and in some, monitor granted. I’m just picking the headlines of some of these efforts.

we are witnessing job losses but we intend to mitigate this with the Economic Sustainability Plan which would save current jobs and create new ones.
The three main Prongs are Agriculture where we are looking to cultivate 20000 to 100000 new hectares of land in cash and arable crops per state. we have now registered 5m farmers and GPS located them to their farm in addition to placing them under bigger farms like Olam to help anchor them and ensure that all their products are purchased with the Federal Government now acting as the up taker of last resort.

we also intend to construct 300000 houses across the 774 local governent we have and these would surely lead to the creation of labor. In addition to these, we intend to make these from mostly locally sourced materials and the firms to handle them would be young architects and building engineers who are currently out of work. The final leg of the tripod is rural electrification in which the government is looking to provide power for those in rural areas off the national grid with an initial target of 5million homes. the labor for this distribution and maintanance is espected to be around a million jobs and this is still aside the 774000 temporary jobs to be created for data collection across the local governments and road construction to farms, markets and ports.

Our government means well for us

Well said Mr. Vice President.

This one is just talking rubbish.
Those countries gave their citizens money, which adversely affected the treasury.

No sensible Nigerian would take this government serious. Arrant nonsense. I'm a Redeemed member, but this man is just a lair.

Okoo