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Sustaining Nigeria’s Economic Growth With Longevity Of Private Initiatives

Since time immemorial, private businesses have always played pivotal roles in the sustenance of economies around the world. Having recognized the superlative efforts of private individuals and cooperate organisations in this direction, capitalist countries such as the United States of America, USA and the United Kingdom, UK with inclinations towards free market-controlled systems driven by demand and supply principles have remained trail blazers in the provision of enabling environments for these initiatives to thrive.

On the other hand, private organisations in socialist climes are often heavily controlled by the government with a view to ensuring regulations in prices of goods and services.

By far, the most interesting aspect of these countries’ approach towards economic growth is their earnest resorts to sustainable expansionist ideologies powered by focus on the capacity of private companies to survive beyond the generations of their founders via business instruments such as the stock market capitalization and controlled involvements of family members in key areas of the enterprises that are meant to function with competences required for the achievement of the different set aims and objectives behind the establishment of companies outside the government circles.

However, the cases of developing countries are different. Here, companies seldom survive beyond the life span of founders. This is unlike developed ones where companies like Guinness Breweries founded by Arthur Guinness (1725 – 1803) in St. James’s Gate, Dublin, Island in 1759 has grown to, not only become a conglomerate but also spread to other countries of the world with diversification into the manufacture of other brands of beer such as Origin in Nigeria and other places. As at the last count, the company has established production centres in 50 countries of the world and 120 others as marketing and distribution nations.

The death of Guinness in 1803 (78 years ago) did not mark the end of the company like the way Odutola Tyers, Lewis Ojukwu and Sons and their likes fizzled out of the Nigeria’s commercial space despite their positive economic impacts on Nigerians even before the nation’s independent in 1960.

The reasons for the early collapse of enterprises in the country can be traced to corruption, greediness on the part of owners that are unwilling to spread ownership through the stock market, overbearing involvement of incompetent family hands, tribalism, poor electricity power supply and lack of government policies that support the protection of local industries. Ours has also become a country where employees are often given to pilfering business owners’ assets to the point of forcing such outfits to close shops with loss of invested human and financial capital.

For sustainability therefore, any registered firm that survives beyond five years and has proofs of compliance with statutory obligations such as taxes and levies to government should be motivated by government through incentives of various kinds to be enlisted in the country’s stock exchange with a view to enhancing expansion.

Beyond these incentives that may equally include access to loans and exposure to seminars on entrepreneurial financial prudence, relevant government agencies should be put in place to monitor the activities of private companies.

With appropriate sensitisations, individuals owning businesses must always envision globalization in their outlay. If organisations such as MTN founded by a South African business man can be so successful in Nigeria, there are no acceptable reasons why Nigerians cannot also establish company branches in other countries, especially within the Sub-Saharan region of Africa.

While it is important for private companies to pay fair and commensurate wages to workers, the government should look into an aspect of taxation called Negative income tax which ensures that certain categories of low income earners are not only exempted from taxation, but are still paid some stipends from social investment funds to augment their earnings.

Furthermore, concrete steps should be taken to capture the workforce within the informal sector in governments’ social security arrangements. This will help to dissuade persons in this category from stealing employers’ belongings as a form of future investment against old age.

From whatever angle anyone may want to look at the economic growth and development of Nigeria, any improvement agenda that fails to recognise the important roles of the private sector in driving an economy, is bound to equally fail.

As presently practiced by the Delta state government, all sub units of governance and the federal government must intensify efforts aimed at business skill acquisitions for the youths and the vulnerable who are willing and able persons in the society through established centres and inclusion of entrepreneurial studies in the curriculum of schools at all levels.

These and other related issues must take the front burner in whatever economic blue print any aspiring leader is promising Nigerians come 2027.

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