World Stage to Focus on Economic Development

• World Stage to Focus on Economic Development

The President/Chief Executive Officer, World Stage Limited, Mr Segun Adeleye, has said the group is committed to creating opportunities for policymakers and the private sector to match the potential in the economy with new development around the world that focuses on the shape of things to come, in order to identify right sources of economic strength for Nigeria.

He said this while speaking on the upcoming WorldStage Economic Summit 2018 with the theme ‘New sources of economic strength to make the future happen’, which will take place in Lagos this month.

Going forward, he said, the WorldStage Economic Summit 2018 would bring to the consciousness of stakeholders the need to be on the driver’s seat of the economy and transit to a future of knowledge, competitiveness and prosperity.

Adeleye was quoted in a statement as saying that credit for economic growth and boom in the developed countries over the years had been linked to strategic identification and development of their economic strengths, while government played the pivotal role of motivating the private sector with incentives to achieve the common goals in most cases.

However, he observed, Nigeria had never at any particular period deliberately developed any area of its economic strength, rather it dumped the agriculture where it had comparative advantage when oil was discovered in the 1960(s) and since then, economic development had been approached haphazardly.

He said, “Notwithstanding that Nigeria has never at any particular period intentionally developed any area of economic strength, the dynamic nature of global interest could be a blessing if the country can identify and run with the right future to fast-track industrialisation, just as the telecommunications sector broke all records of growth in the last decade.”

In a global economy where tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook are richer than all African countries put together, he said managers of the economy could not continue to feign ignorance of the needful: that mineral resource would no longer be a major factor in future relevance and prosperity.