The Director General of Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Mr Frank Nweke Jnr has admonished the governments at all levels to reassess their concept of security votes in line with the security needs of the country.
Nweke said this has become imperative giving the fact that the more money the governments allocate as security votes the more the security challenges the country is confronted with.
The former minister of Information stated this at the “Roundtable on Micro Small and Medium Scale Enterprises Competitiveness in Nigeria”, which held in collaboration with the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, MSME, Project in Abuja yesterday.
Nweke said that” it was time public officials were held accountable for the sums expended as security votes in spite of which, insecurity appeared on the rise”.
He said, “we are concerned about the increasing insecurity like any other citizens.
It is a source of concern because we know, for instance, that there are certain categories of public expenditure which are known as security votes over which people have never been allowed to ask questions, demand accountability and we are saying at this point how come, we have become so insecure despite all the huge sums of money allocated to security and security votes all over the country in the pasts several years?”
He noted that if the various officials and agencies of government became more accountable they would know if there was need for citizens to contribute more money as everyone was concerned and nobody knew where a bomb or an arm robbery would occur again.
The Roundtable focussed on the challenges of entrepreneur development in Nigeria and observed that issues of infrastructure, power supply, absence of the rail system and access to finance among others where great challenges to the sector.
Sadly, it also observed that due to the many challenges of the economy, businesses suffered with enterprises remaining uncompetitive compared to their counterparts in other parts of the world, while Nigeria remained an unfriendly environment for MSMEs.
Earlier in his welcome address, Chairman of the NESG, Folusho Phillips, that Nigeria had over 40 million entrepreneurs and called on the need to unleash the economic potential of these people.
The Chairman observed that Nigerian economic potential were in 3 spheres which included the Foreign Development Investment (FDI), Organised private sector and the base of the SMEs which had the largest economic participants.
Mr Phillips observed that the third tier was the most viable and impactful yet suffered from lack of loans to fund developments, lacked infrastructures, lacked ability to expand and write business plan or compute data among others.