DONALD DUKE URGES FG TO REDUCE ENERGY PRICES FOR ECONOMIC PRODUCTIVITY

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Former Cross River Governor Donald Duke has urged the federal government to cut increasing energy prices in order to boost economic output.

He was a guest on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande, a sociopolitical program that aired on Friday.

Duke chastised President Bola Tinubu’s administration for the “fundamental error” of withdrawing petrol and energy subsidies for almost the same period.

“What we are doing to our people is just not sustainable. We’ve got to revisit all those policies and put our people first. And this is not (about) subsidy, this is about enhancing the productivity of our people.

“If you reduce energy prices and people become more productive, the economy will grow even further,” he said.

According to him, four factors affect inflation in Nigeria: high energy costs, over-inflated contracts, ill-distribution of wealth and high interest rates.

“We need to get the economy working for the people. That’s the bottom line. At the end of the day, people don’t care about how they are governed as much as they care about bread and butter.

“The function of a government is to ensure the productivity of its citizens within an orderly environment. If you look at the unemployment ratio of our country, we are largely unproductive; the dependency ratio is high.”

Duke said productivity determines the stability of any nation and the current administration should do all to power industrialisation to reverse the import-dependent status of Nigeria.

“Over 60% of the pressure on our foreign exchange earnings is oil import, if you can domesticate that, the exchange rate will dramatically drop.

“Even beyond that, we need to question the things we import. We are running an import-dependent economy which is wrong. With 230 million people growing every year, we need to run a productive, manufacturing, agrarian economy. We are not doing that. We, literally import everything at the expense of our people,” he said.

Duke, who was governor of the South-South state from May 1999 to May 2007, stated that rising oil prices have harmed the economy and forced international industrial enterprises to leave Nigeria.

He claimed that oil and gasoline costs should not be measured globally, as this would harm local industry. Duke believes that energy prices should be controlled for local refineries and industry.

“A lot of companies are leaving Nigeria today because of the cost of production and the exchange rate,” he said.

As Nigeria battles its current economic crisis, sparked by the government’s twin policies of removing petrol subsidies and unifying forex windows, some manufacturing companies have exited the country in recent months, the most recent being Kimberly-Clark, the manufacturer of the Huggies and Kotex diaper brands.

Other multinationals that have left Nigeria in the last year include Procter & Gamble (P&G), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Unilever, and Sanofi-Aventi Nigeria, among others.

High energy prices and currency depreciation are two common causes cited by the companies.