TheCable

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the coordinating minister of the economy and minister of finance, has urged Nigerians not to give in to fear as a result of the challenges facing the country presently.

She said Nigerians should focus on the strength “we have as a country”.

The minister said this while delivering a keynote address at the ministerial summit on insurance in Abuja on Monday.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Many of us, private companies and households are concerned about how the current economic challenges will affect them. That is natural and legitimate,” she said.

“But we should avoid the kind of fear that will paralyse us or make us do the wrong things out of fear and alarm.”

“We have challenges but we also have strengths – a diversifying economy, increasing non-oil revenues from tax, a growing private sector and a mix of the right policies to help the economy grow sustainably.”

She noted that Nigeria is not 100 per cent import dependent and it also has a growing number of locally-produced goods and commodities.

“These are strengths that we can fall back on to help us in this challenging times,” she said, pointing out that opportunities for job creation and economic development abound in the insurance sector.

“Unleashing the latent energies of the insurance industry to create more jobs and boost economic development is one of our strategic responses to close the gap created by the economic challenges we are confronting at the moment.”

Okonjo-Iweala expressed optimism that with the success recorded with the banking and pension sector, the insurance sector would achieve even more growth.

However, she revealed that government was open to ideas from members of the public on how to move the country forward.

“Government is open to constructive criticism and ideas because we need to work together as a country to tackle these present challenges,” she said.

“But we should not let the merchants of fear, those who want to politicise and make political capital by distorting facts about the economy in order to sow hopelessness and fear, succeed.”

Commenting on the vision for the insurance industry by year 2020, she said: “The first part of our vision would be to grow our gross written premiums (GWP) of N300 billion today to N1 trillion in the next three years,, and to N5 trillion within the next decade.

“So we should be attaining gross premiums of about $30 billion in a decade from today. Let us focus on that prize ahead and work towards that goal.

“The second part of the vision would be to deliver jobs in this industry. The insurance sector is a powerful engine for job creation in our economy. “But today, there are only about 30,000 people working in the Nigerian insurance industry.

“This sector should clearly be creating many more jobs for us. The third part of our vision would be to widen access by growing the number of insurance policyholders in the country.”