Aso Villa Reads for 07/10/2019
Every day, we bring you the best stories that the Media is reporting about the Government of Nigeria
President Muhammadu Buhari has nominated Akinwumi Adesina for re-election as the president of African Development Bank. Adesina, confirmed this in a speech he delivered when he received Emeka-Anyaoku Life-Time Achievement Award organised by Hallmarks of Labour Foundation in Lagos on Sunday. The AfDB boss appreciated President Buhari for the nomination, adding that the country had invested so much in him. According to him, when asked by former President Goodluck Jonathan to serve as Minister of Agriculture, he served Nigeria to the best of his ability. He said, “With the strong support of former President Jonathan and the then President elect, Buhari, we campaigned very hard for the position of the president of the AfDB. “By God’s grace, I was elected president of the African Development Bank on May 28, 2015, exactly 24 hours after my term of office as minister ended. “The nation jubilated as I became the first-ever Nigerian to be elected president of the bank since its establishment in 1964. Punch reports.
Punch reported that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Mr Boss Mustapha, said the Federal Government would ensure that Nollywood actors get a fair deal from their trade. Mustapha stated this at the grand finale of a stage play titled “Agbarho The Musical”, produced by 30-year-old Patrick Otoro, on Saturday in Abuja. He said the proprietary rights of Nollywood actors needed to be protected by the government so that they can derive maximum return from their artistic endeavours. “One of the things that government has to do is to make sure that their rights are protected because that is why they lose a lot of money. There are a lot of leakages in the process in terms of people pirating their products. ”Nollywood in the African continent and even in the world is thriving and big industry. But the actors and actresses, do they receive commiserate benefit from the kind of work they do?”
According to This Day, the federal government will demolish substantial part of the 40-year-old Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) terminal and replace with the new one built by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) in December. This is coming as aviation labour leaders have rejected the planned concession of four major airports in the country. While passenger facilitation is conducted in the new structure, government plans to quickly rebuild the old terminal and dovetail it with the new one in a seamless design to double its capacity so that the facility would be able to process the projected 10 million passengers per annum by 2030. The MMIA was commissioned in 1979 when it started operation with passenger capacity of 250,000 per annum but in 2017 the airport processed about 6,273,545 passengers, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
As reported by Punch, Special Adviser to the President on Economic Matters, Dr. Yemi Dipeolu, has said that the Federal Government is set to release N600bn for capital projects within the next three months. He also noted that the government had released about N1.74trn for capital projects in the 2018 fiscal year. The overall goal, he said, was to enable “substantial and landmark transformation of infrastructure projects.” Dipeolu spoke on Monday at the roundtable held by the Securities and Exchange Commission on the implementation plans of the realisation of African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement. Speaking about the contribution of agriculture to the economy, he said, “It is key to organise production in the agricultural sector so that every part of the value chain contributes to growth; starting with the strategic choice of crops, agricultural research, to focus on seeds that can substantially improve yield.
The African Development bank (AFDB) has announced its disbursement of $5.93 million grant to boost productivity in the agriculture sector in Africa. Jonas Chianu, Coordinator Agriculture Fast track Fund, AFDB, speaking at a knowledge sharing network mission in Abuja, said there was an urgent need to close the yield gap and build the robust agriculture sector to sustainably feed the growing population in Africa. The AfDB regional member countries that are eligible for the AFT grant awards are Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania. Business Day reports (Page 6)
The Federal Government has disclosed that the United States of America (USA) and other key foreign allies hold the ace to deepening technology ecosystem in Nigeria in order to create a long –lasting technological innovation and economic growth. Richard Adeniyi Adebayo, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, made this disclosure at a breakfast meeting of the U.S. Nigeria Council (USNC) for Food Security, Trade and Investment on the margins of the just concluded 74th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City, USA, recently. He said that technology hubs are critical to the country’s economic growth in order to enable start-ups companies to flourish. Business Day (Page 42).
