Yinka Kolawole
The Minister of State forFinance,  Mr. Remi Babalola, has condemned the  continuous importation of cement into Nigeria in spite of the abundant deposit of limestone, a major raw material in the production of cement, in the country.

Babalola made the remark in Alaguntan, near Abeokuta, Ogun Sate, during the inauguration of a 1.2 million metric tonnes per annum granite quarry plant of Multiverse Resources Plc, valued at N1.5 billion.

According to him, Nigeria should be in a position to export cement to other African countries by now if the country had been able to get it right in terms of infrastructure and the right policy support for different sectors of the economy.

He asserted that what the nation needed to do was to open up the economic environment for the private sector to thrive. “Why on earth should we at this point be importing cement? It doesn’t make any sense, whatsoever. What we should be doing at this point in time is that we should be exporting cement to other African countries.

We have some challenges in the area of power generation but some measures are already being put in place to address this.
“What we should consider should be holistic, the whole gamut of the economy; not just in the mining sector. It is about restructuring the economy.

What the Federal Government has been doing with Vision 2020 is to reconstruct, restructure and change the architectural platform of the Nigerian economy, so that we move away from the mono-cultural perspective, whereby what we are dealing with is oil and gas. We should open up the whole of the economic atmosphere in such a way that it will be conducive for the private investors like Multiverse to be able to participate and move the economy to another level.

“So, what we are doing is to open up the economy like what we have witnessed in the telecom sector, where the turnover is beginning to out-shoot that of the manufacturing sector. How old is the liberalisation of the telecommunications sector and you can see that the manufacturing industries had been there even before independence.

“My coming here today is a testimony of the importance we attach to things like this. How many companies like this do you have in Nigeria today, listed on the Stock Exchange? The mine and steel have the capacity to transform the economy significantly. What we should do is to take some sectors like this and allow the private sector to come in. If we do this, we should be exporting cement, exporting rice and other products,” he stated.

Also speaking at the occasion, Minister of Mines and Steel, Alhaji Musa Mohammed Sada, commended the owners of the company, pledging that the Federal Government would soon establish a special fund to develop that sector of the economy.

“Government is committed to providing a conducive legal, social and fiscal environment for the private sector to invest in the mining sector. While the private sector will be the key players, government will pay attention to the provision of geo-sciences information and also by extension to artisans and small scale operators,” he assured.