Osinbajo:

Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council has completed a 60-day national action plan with 70 per cent of success and has started the second 60-day national action plan.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo disclosed this in an interview after opening “The Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Forum 2017’’ in Lagos on Saturday.

He stated that the government had a lot of benchmarks and very aggressive timelines on what it wanted to do.

“We are seeing a lot of progress on ease of doing business but it is an evolving work; but there has been a great deal of success.

“We think the ease of doing business is entirely strategic to the successes of businesses and of cause the success of our own economy; so it is priority for us,’’ he stated.

The Vice President observed that the only way to avoid lack of consistency in the agenda was to have governments that were serious in what it was doing.

“As far as the government of Nigeria is concerned today we are  very serious and committed to the programmes being implemented.

“We have ensured that we have timelines, we have thresholds and set all types of the right parameters for doing what we need to do and we are doing it consistently.”

While declaring the Forum open earlier, Osinbajo had asked the youths drawn from no fewer than 55 African countries to escape from the perceived failures of their past history and focus on the future for the continent’s prosperity.

The Vice President’s remarks titled “The Tyranny of History’’ identified the problems posed by dependence on the past history of the continent.

“Our past failures can become a barrier to progress and freedom,’’ he declared.

Accordingly, he said that history of Africa should not determine the future because the present is better than the past.

The initiator of the forum, Mr Tony Elumelu noted that the African continent was surrounded by poverty while the youth needed jobs to have economic hope.

“There are so many uncertainties about the future and the continent has not made much progress in entrepreneurship.’’

Elumelu said that between 2006 and 2016 capital inflows into the continent was nearly half a trillion dollars but did not change the basic human development index.

He stated that the youth escaped to Europe in search of greener pastures through dangerous routes and some got drowned in the Mediterranean while the survivors were subjected to inhuman treatments.

He urged the youth to take the initiatives to liberate and develop the continent.

“Africa remains underdeveloped and a new development model is needed,’’ he said, adding that it informed the creation of the foundation with seed capital of $100 million for 10 years to assist entrepreneurs. (NAN)