The Central Bank (CBN) Governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, says the Federal Government and the CBN have identified three Nigerian universities for the training and development of manpower required for the Lekki financial hub.

He named the institutions as the University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria Nsukka and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. They are to train Economists, Accountants and Information Technology experts for the execution of the Lekki financial hub project. He said this was necessary because the critical need of a financial hub was the availability of skilled manpower on a continuous basis. Soludo said the Federal Government would work with the Lagos State government in developing basic infrastructure that would help to actualize the dream.

He said the Nigerian economy needed to grow by at least 12 per cent per annum to ensure that the proposed financial hub for Africa came to fruition.

According to him, Nigeria has both natural and human resources to bring the dream to reality. Prof. Soludo said the challenge of the recent gains of macro economic  policies had made it imperative for the country to harmonise all policies in the financial sector, noting that the actualizing of the policies under the aegis of the  “Financial System Strategy (FSS) 2020” was to make the country Africa’s financial hub.

According to Soludo, the desire of the apex bank to consolidate the medium and long term benefits in the economy under the FSS 2020 necessitated the actualizing  of a three-day international conference scheduled for Abuja from today. He explained that the desire to converge policies that drive the pension, banking and the  insurance sub-sector reforms also stemmed from the need to make Nigeria a sustainable investors’ destination. To him, the apex bank’s idea is that the nation’s economy must be further diversified and grow at a rate of at least 12 per cent per annum to achieve the dreams of the FSS 2020.

“The economy must grow or run at 12 per cent per year on the average and be diversified from a dominant primary commodity-based economy,” Soludo said, adding that the policy drive of the FSS 2020 was that with a population growth rate of about three per cent per annum, Nigeria must engage its large army of youths to create an enabling environment with the aim of attracting about 17 million skilled Nigerians in the diaspora.

The major approach of actualizing these goals in the next 13 years, Soludo said, would be an institution-based plan to emerge among the fastest and safest economies in the world by 2020.
FSS 2020 conference, to be attended by participants from across the globe, would be declared open by President Umaru Yar’Adua.

Source: vanguard