The Minister of Trade and Investment, Mr Olusegun Aganga, said in Lagos on Thursday that the Federal Government would generate at least 1.8 million jobs annually to tackle unemployment.
Aganga said this at the inauguration of a printing press owned by Dr Doyin Abiola, wife of the late Chief MKO Abiola.
“We need to create a minimum of 1.8 million jobs annually to fight the problem of unemployment.
“To achieve this, we need to provide the needed platform to create jobs for the teeming youths in the country.
“We need to attract foreign investments and support our local industry through patronage.
“With all of these, we can sustain the companies, retain jobs and create more jobs.
“The Federal Government is conscious of all these and it initiating policies and programmes to address the problem of unemployment,’’ he said.
The minister said as part of strategies to boost employment, the Federal Government had attracted investments worth 14 billion dollars in the petrochemical sector, saying 9 billion dollars of the investments will be in Lagos.
Aganga commended the setting up of the printing press, saying it will provide employment.
Also speaking on the occasion, Gov. Babatunde Fashola, stressed the need for Nigerians to patronise Made-in-Nigeria goods to enable local factories to keep people on their jobs.
He said patronising imported goods had a deleterious effect on the economy as it aided the creation of jobs in other countries.
The governor said there was also the need to improve power supply in the country in a bid to make industries more competitive and to create jobs.
“The missing infrastructure that we must get right is power supply. We can imagine how many of those jobs we have shipped out of the country because there was no power supply for the industries to operate effectively.
“There are many establishments that could change life in the country that were kept abroad. Therefore, we need to create more jobs to ensure that we keep the youths in the country engaged,” Fashola said.
He promised that the state government would continue to boost industrialisation. [NAN]
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