Tony Elumelu, Chairman, Heirs Holdings Ltd., has\u00a0 stressed the need for investors to report positive issues that would encourage doing business in the country.<\/p>\n
Mr. Elumelu made the appeal at the Presidential Policy Dialogue at the 18th National Economic Summit in Abuja.<\/p>\n
He said that though corruption should be tackled in the system, it should not be the major focus of reporting issues concerning the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout sounding a bit defensive, I think we tend to over bloat this issue of corruption in Nigeria and in fact, almost all the speakers who have spoken today are talking about corruption.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the GSM licensing started in Nigeria, most strong telecommunications company didn\u2019t want to come to Nigeria to do business because they were afraid of corruption.<\/p>\n
\u201cMTN came to Nigeria to do business, they got the licence, the stock price crashed in South Africa Stock Exchange, they started five, six years down the line; Nigeria produces over 60 per cent of the GDP across the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut they don\u2019t tell that story about Nigeria, the story you hear is about corruption,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
According to him, the company won one of the biggest power stations at 200 million dollars without consulting anybody but going by the process.<\/p>\n
He said that Nigeria was a country of over 170 million population and should not be projected in a bad light.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes some people are corrupt in Nigeria, a country of about 170 million people; we have one, two, or five per cent that are corrupt; we talk so much about corruption and every speaker wants to talk about it instead of saying the good things,\u2019\u2019 he added.<\/p>\n
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Coordinating Minister for the Economy, also said that a lot needed to be done to tackle leakages in the economy to generate revenue.<\/p>\n
She said that the Federal Government had given the Chief of Defence Staff a challenge to deal with issues of oil theft and bunkering.<\/p>\n
She said that during the ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo\u2019s administration, the level of leakage in oil theft was reduced from 150,000 barrel to 50,000 barrel a day.<\/p>\n
She said that Nigeria needed to elicit the help of the international communities to achieve this.<\/p>\n
She noted that through the Presidential Task Force on Subsidy, a good story could be told with the identification of dubious claims of about N232 billion.
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Tony Elumelu, Chairman, Heirs Holdings Ltd., has\u00a0 stressed the need for investors to report positive issues that would encourage doing business in the country. Mr. Elumelu made the appeal at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n