The Director of Economic Development, Nothern Elders Forum, Amb. Prof. Steve Ugbah said security challenges ravaging the Northern Nigeria would not dissuade the region from charting plans and programmes that would attract industrialisation, investments, and development.
Prof. Ugbah made the disclosure at the sidelines of the Northern Nigeria Investment and Industrialisation Summit, organised by Northern Elders Forum (NEF), with the theme: Unlocking Strategic Opportunities in Mining, Agriculture and Power, recently in Abujaa.
Ugbah, who is a Commissioner in the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), described the relationship between the insecurity in the North and the need to attract industries and investments, noted that development has the capacity to curb insecurity.
“It’s like a chicken and an egg story. Which one comes first? The chicken or the egg? They all go together. You can’t have security without progress. You can’t have security without development. When you have development, it insulate us against insecurity. You provide the solution to insecurity.
“When you start constructing things, when you start manufacturing things, when you start building plants, you’re also building the infrastructure alongside those projects for development,” he said.
He highlighted infrastructure as the driver of every development mining, addind that, agriculture and industrialisation cannot thrive without roads, bridges, railways, etc., insisting that when infrastructure is put in place insecurity would be reduced.
Responding to the issue of the focus sector areas of mining, agriculture, and power, Prof.Ugbah explained that they have to start from the immediate needs and move to other areas progressively.
“We have to start one step at a time. Mining, agriculture and power are not the only things that will drive our development efforts.
“There are other things that will drive our development efforts. But we pick things that we can manage. We pick things we can deliver now and then work towards working some of those things in progressively.
“So, This conference, this summit is deliberate. There are so many things to talk about. The banking industry, the finance industry, that’s another whole area. So we are being very strategic,” he stated.
