The 13th Annual Business Law Conference
The Nigerian Bar Association Section on Business Law (NBA-SBL) is one of the specialist sections of the NBA set up to engender the professional development of Nigerian commercial lawyers and it hosted its 13th annual Business Law Conference at the Eko Hotel and Suites Conventional centre from the 26th to the 28th of June 2019. With several international and local experts examining and analysing the challenges facing the Nigeria economy, this year’s theme focused on “Growth, Investment and Employment: Beyond Rhetoric”
The conference commenced with a dinner held on the 26th of June 2019 which was attended by a few of Nigerians most distinguished in the names of Ho. Justice Bode Rhodes-Vivour, Hon. Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammed, CFR, CJN, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila and His Excellency Babajide Olushola Sanwo-Olu. Between the 27th and 28th of June 2019, the conference comprised of fourteen different sessions (six Plenary sessions and Eight breakout sessions) in which experts discussed many issues related to the Nigerian economy. The topics discussed included: a ‘Triage on the Nigerian Economy’, ‘Health, Security and Education-Building a Foundation for Inclusive Growth’, ‘Moving from Crude Export to Value Addition’, ‘Leading the Charge-The Private Sector and the Nigerian Economy’, ‘Smarter Regulation Making Mining Work in Nigeria’, ‘Improving Financial Services as a Catalyst for Growing Micro, Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (MSMEs)’, ‘#MeToo- Sexual Harassment in the Workplace’, and ‘The New Era of Taxation in Nigeria’.
These are some of the highlighted issues discussed in the some of the plenary and breakout sessions on the challenges faced in the Nigerian economy:
1. The high rate of youth employment versus the astronomical yearly population growth.
2. The lack of a mandatory universal healthcare system/program, and severe underfunding in various states making efforts to provide basic primary health coverage.
3. The grossly insufficient investment in the agriculture value chain, to transform yield in livestock and dairy products, food crops, and funding value addition including storage, transportation, packaging and export of agriculture and allied products.
4. An insufficient dispute resolution and judicial system, which includes commercial disputes taking grossly inordinate duration at the trial courts, unmeritorious appeals and other various other inefficiencies.
5. Insecurity and insurgencies fuelled by socio-economic issues, such as unemployment and underemployment, low education proficiency, lack of healthcare, inadequate housing and extreme discontent caused primarily by the foregoing factors.
6. Lack of clarity of tax laws, rules and regulations and inconsistent applications of same.
7. Sexual harassment in the workplace. The need to create an environment conducive to protecting victims and importantly providing swift recourse to enforcing rights and disciplining offenders
In view of all these issues highlighted, the panellist/experts outlined a number of recommendations which was aimed at examining the factors, steps and actions required to ensuring and increasing economic growth, rates of investment and employment. These include:
1. The liberalisation of the oil sector in a way that government will allow more flexibility in terms of pricing so as to encourage investments in the sector
2. The need to diversify from oil. It was suggested that the Nigerian economy relies heavily on the produce and profits of oil and as a result of this neglects other sources of investments that may prove fruitful in the economy. In agriculture for example, they further suggested that investments should be made in five critical stages of the agricultural value chain, that is, production, transportation, storage, processing and export.
3. Government should remove VAT from locally produced LPG and instead impose tariffs on imported LPG in order to encourage local production, availability and domestic utilisation of gas
4. There should be an urgent need for rapid human capital development and investment across health, education, agriculture, security and other sectors to tackle unemployment while keeping population growth in check through family planning and controlled immigration.
5. The importance of policy driven healthcare programs. It was suggested that the federal laws governing health insurance should move from ‘may’ to ‘shall’ in order to make healthcare not optional for employers.
6. Financial inclusion for the youth should be prioritised to provide them access loans and other entrepreneurship benefits.
7. Business should establish clear policies prohibiting sexual harassment in their respective organisations including severe sanctions for those who violate the policy.
8. Nigerians in general should develop a high sense of patriotism, optimism and sell the Nigerian brand.
The NBA-SBL committed to doing the following:
1. Develop a policy against sexual harassment for consideration and adoption by law firms.
2. Push for a smarter regulation and in doing so engage all levels of governments as well as other relevant stakeholders.