By Emeka Ejere

Participants at the 2018 WorldStage Economic Summit have made a strong case for the exploitation of other avenues of economic strength in Nigeria, saying it will save the country from the dangers of oil price volatility and facilitate growth.

They emphasised that the time had come for Nigeria to identify sectors that can propel long term growth in which she has strong advantage over other economies.

This, they said, will enhance the contributions of non-oil sectors to the nation’s gross domestic product, GDP, and make the naira more competitive in the international market.

Presenting the lead paper on the theme of the summit, ‘New sources of economic strength to make the future happen,’ which held in Lagos on Tuesday, October 23, Tunde Adeoye, an associate professor of Economics, described total dependence on oil as a risk not worth taking.

He observed that the present increase being recorded in the price of oil was as a result of sanctions imposed on some oil-producing nations and will cash once the sanctions are lifted.

“Nigeria depending on only oil is a risk we should not take,” Adeoye cautioned.

He added: “The increase we’re seeing in oil price now is as a result of sanctions imposed on some nations. If those sanctions are lifted, there will be too much production and supply of the product and the price will crash.”

Adeoye identified enhancement of agricultural value chain, massive investment in tourism and investment in solid minerals as the best economic decisions managers of the Nigerian economy should take now to ensure a good future.

Also speaking, Olusola Teniola, the president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, stressed the need for the country to pay more attention to human capital development and embrace modern technologies as the “world now is all about data.”

He noted that nations like Japan and Singapore are among the biggest economies not because of any natural resource deposit, but because of substantial investment in human capital development.

Earlier in his welcome address, Segun Adeleye, President/CEO, World Stage Limited, noted that credit for economic growth and boom in the developed countries over the years had been linked to strategic identification and development of their economic strengths while government played the pivotal role of motivating the private sector with incentives to achieve the common goals in most cases.

He regretted that Nigeria had never at any particular period deliberately developed any area of her economic strength, rather, “it dumped the agriculture where it had comparative advantage when oil was discovered in the 1960(s) and since then economic development has been approached haphazardly.”

Adeleye argued that in a global economy where tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook are richer than all African countries put together, managers of the economy could not continue to fake ignorance of the needful, “that mineral resource will no longer be a major factor in future relevance and prosperity.”

Conscious of the growing population of Nigeria with about 50 percent youth unemployment rate, the last two editions of the summit (2016 and 2017) respectively focused on “Addressing the unemployment crisis in Nigeria; and “Transforming Business and Economy Through Innovation.”