ABCON boss urges review of SMEs palliative model

Charles Okonji

The National President, Association of Bureau DE change Operators of Nigeria, Alhaji Aminu Gwadabe, has called on the federal government to review the model of the palliative it has released to small businesses and manufacturers across the country to address the funding gap due to COVID-19.

Gwadabe who made this call in an exclusive interview with The Nation stressed that the government must have to revisit the informal sector model if the Nigerian economy must grow beyond COVID-19 pandemic.

“I will advise the government to expand the import prohibition list, such that any item that has alternative in Nigeria should be excluded from the list of import, and be completely placed on banned with the exception of critical raw materials. That is the only way we can save the value of naira and also conserve our foreign reserves.

“The government should come to producers groups, farmers, and manufacturers as well as SMEs, identify them in groups and touch their activities so that they can be able to put the economy back on track,” he stated.

Commenting on the value of naira, he said; “We wrote to the CBN to suspend the forex allocation and we called for market holiday, because the over 3,500 operators used to come together weekly to take their allocations and with this we cannot manage the social distancing successfully and this made us very vulnerable to the pandemic.

“We have designed and developed an online money management that will redistribute the crowd into 20 per plot where members can visit portals to register daily to obtain their tickets to get numbers for queuing to collect their money so that we do not need to gather crowd in that area any longer.

This is one of the positive initiatives that the pandemic has forced us into developing to utilizing some of our operations.”

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Gwadabe pointed out that the pandemic has also created another chain reaction in terms the oil price, which has continuously declined and has brought about reduction in oil revenue, saying that it has also affected our foreign reserves.

“As long as the foreign reserves are depleted with the attendant decrease in the sale of oil, our business is also shaking because our business is dependent upon because that is what the CBN use to defend the value of Naira. So with this, you can imagine how vulnerable the Naira would be in this situation.”