Nigeria Content Online

The Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) will host Nigeria’s
first non-oil exports conference, exhibition, and awards.

It is designed to provide a forum for private-public sectors
dialogue on trade policies, export incentives, and challenges aimed at
facilitating the country’s drive to become one of the top 20 economies by the
year 2020.

The expo, which is expected to come in the mould of the now
popular annual Nigeria Oil and Gas (NOG) conference/exhibitions, would showcase
the opportunities in the non-oil sector of the country’s economy, with a view
to providing incentives to local investors, as well as attracting
export-oriented international firms to the country.

“As a country that has set for itself the target of becoming one
of the world’s top 20 developed economies by 2020, Nigeria’s ranking in the
global economic development index is not going to be oil and gas-based, rather
on the quantum of its participation in world trade activities,” Femi Boyede,
the chief executive, Koinonia Ventures Limited, the collaborating export
consultancy firm for the conference, said yesterday in Abuja.

With the theme: ‘Non-Oil Exports: the Road to Nigeria’s Vision
20-2020′, it will focus on training and human development, export management
services, export incentives processing, export development, impact assessment
of government policies, as well as government policy strategies and
implementation for the non-oil export sector.

The time is now

Mr. Aboyede said the time is ripe for a platform for local and
foreign investors on an annual basis to focus global attention on the country’s
non-oil export sector, describing it as the main driver of Nigeria’s economy
and the main road towards the achievement of economic vision in the next ten
years.

“This is the only way to show that Nigeria is actually charting
a course for the realisation of the Vision 20-2020 objectives. Every year,
Nigerians spend huge foreign exchange to attend such events as INDABA, the
minerals sector development event in South Africa, and the Offshore Technology
Conference (OTC) in Houston, for the oil and gas technology.

“It is time for Nigeria to also have an annual programme that
would attract the global community to gather and talk about its vast non-oil
sector potentials and opportunities,” he declared.

The exhibition, he said, will showcase not only existing export
products, but also potential export products and services that go out of
Nigeria to the world, including an array of Nigeria’s agricultural commodities,
ethnic crafts, herbal products, foods, as well as diverse range of goods
available for exports.

“The exhibition is not for the companies to beat their chest
that they have arrived, but also a capacity building exercise, where up and
coming exporters are able to see what the more advanced and technologically
equipped ones are doing, as well as to learn from the international
participants how to move the non-oil sector forward, particularly on how to
adapt their products to suit the international market place and enhance
competitiveness,” he explained.

He stressed the need for Nigerians to begin to accord
recognition and encouragement to those companies that defy all the challenges
of infrastructural inefficiency and deficiency as well as high cost of doing
business in Nigeria, to promote the country’s name in the global export map,
saying the awards to 20 indigenous firms during the event would be to recognise
them as performers in the export industry.