Review of Nigeria’s Trade Policy will ensure inflow of investments, Dr Olusegun Aganga, the Minister of Trade and Investment, has said. Aganga spoke in Abuja on Monday when he received the draft strategy for the new Nigeria Trade Policy from the Committee headed by Prof. Ademola Oyejide.

He said that the review would also provide comprehensive roadmap for boosting Nigeria’s domestic, regional and international trade. Aganga observed that the ministry would focus on areas where the country currently has comparative and competitive advantage as a strategy to make Nigeria the hub of trade and investment in Africa and the world.

“For the first time in 10 years, we are going to have a policy that looks modern, comprehensive and cuts across all the sectors of the economy, including services. In most countries of the world, the services sector actually contributes the largest part of their Gross Domestic Product; if we focus on services alone, it is a sector that can create a lot of employment,’’ he said.

Aganga further noted that the work done by the committee and the recommendations made were evidence-based and backed with studies.

He said that the ministry would study the recommendations of the committee in consultation with all relevant stakeholders and come up with a final policy that would serve the overall interest of the country. In his remark, Oyejide said that the committee had looked into some grey areas in the past trade policies and made necessary recommendations on how they could be resolved.

“We have looked at some of the areas that have been causing problems for us as a country and we commissioned studies to find out how other countries have dealt with problems like these in the past.

The beautiful thing is that there is no World Trade Organisation rule which does not have its own flexibility; the way that other countries have managed this process is to look for those flexibilities and find a way to use alternative policies that are really WTO complaint. The Ministry of Trade and Investment is free to look at those alternatives that we suggested and see which ones need to be used,’’ he said.