GROWING AND DEVELOPING THE NIGERIAN ECONOMY THROUGH BI-LATERAL CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS (2)

It is this new reality that motivated the dynamics of competing interests and the aggregation of peculiar interests under specific umbrellas. These collectives were styled, Bi-lateral Chambers of Commerce and Industry, in order to pursue and sustain beneficial socio-economic agenda mostly trained on contributing to the public good. And Nigeria, through the strategic Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade & Investment, must evolve and sustain creative policy engineering processes for taking advantage of two key developments here:

• The incipient global process in a growing number of countries for exploiting effective domestic-demand, especially population-reliant, to drive inclusive growth in GDP.
  
• The dynamics of aggregating independent peculiar foreign socio- economic interests in the domestic productive space.

It is against this backdrop that we shall identify and examine the issues under consideration in this discourse.

BI-LATERAL CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE & INDUSTRY IN NIGERIA

A Chamber of Commerce and Industry is widely described as a voluntary and optional association of peculiar interests whose membership consists of corporate business organisations, civic leaders and individual business people.

A typical chamber seeks to promote the peculiar interests of members through lobbying governments and policy technocrats for appropriate business incentives/environments and the facilitation of members’ businesses in various profitable ways and also to engender the evolution and sustenance of effective business networks.

A bi-lateral chamber of commerce and industry seeks to raise the stakes of interests higher through the promotion of seamless trade and investment between countries and the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) from the bi-lateral partner which is economically stronger.

The dynamics of the new emerging economies are largely characterized by a widening web of interdependence in international trade, investment and industry, and now the growing reality of domestic-demand driven inclusive economic growth, reliant on population, effective resource management and national endowments.

The Nigerian domestic economy should therefore, pay better than a passing attention to and become interested in bi-lateral chambers of commerce and industry which have over the years tended to congregate around the following minimum peculiar interests, and for and over which they have sought and sustained bi-lateral relationships, namely:

• Attraction of sufficient and sustained FDIs
•  Institution of productive match-making platforms for members
•  Promotion of trade and investment missions to each other’s countries
•  Engendering of the suitable enabling environment for profitable business relationships between members of both countries
•  Encouraging the sustenance of transfer of suitable technological capacities for economic growth, development and job creation
•  A viable platform for capacity enhancement, growth and development in the core areas of human capital, global markets, consultancy/transaction advisory services, quality and standards enforcement
•  Funding support for small and medium industrial and commercial enterprises in a receiving bi-lateral partner-country.

We will continue this expose next week as we continue to update you on knowledge resources you can use.

This is BISIKE SERIES!