President and Chief executive of Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote has appealed to the Federal Government (FG) to focus more on the real sector growth, noting that the growth of the economy is dependent on the effective development of the sector.

In a chat recently with select journalists, Dangote said: “Only the real sector – that is, manufacturing and agriculture – only industrialization can develop any nation’s economy and its people, not imports. In Nigeria, we are doing too many imports.

In dairy products alone, that is, in milk, cheese and similar products, we spend about $1 billion on imports annually. For how long will we continue this? Chicken producers in Nigeria cannot meet local consumption, let alone export. And why must they be so shortsighted as to be producing for local consumption alone? What they should look at is how to capture the rest of the West African market.