Soludo, El-Rufai to speak on repositioning economy

The governors will serve as panelists at a policy conversation in Abuja, which is jointly organised by the Africa Programme of the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Abuja-based Agora Policy.

Billed to attract the best of Nigeria’s economic, political, academic and policy elite, the event will focus on ‘How Nigeria can build a Post-Oil Economic Future’.

Other confirmed panelists are former CEO of Access Bank Aigboje Imoukhuede; World Bank’s Country Director for Nigeria Dr. Shubham Chaudhuri and Director of the Carnegie Africa Programme, Dr. Zainab Usman.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, established in 1910, is one of the oldest and most respected think tanks in the world. It was ranked as the number one think tank on the 2020 Global Go-To Think Tank Index published by the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Programme of the University of Pennsylvania, United States.

Agora Policy is a nascent Nigerian think tank committed to generating evidence-based and practical solutions to Nigeria’s urgent challenges. It was founded by Waziri Adio, immediate past Executive Secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) and one of Nigeria’s leading columnists.

The event will also feature the presentation and an exposition on the policy implications of Dr. Usman’s book titled ‘Economic Diversification in Nigeria: The Politics of Building a Post-Oil Economy’.

Beyond their positions as governors, Soludo and El-Rufai will share insights from their diverse backgrounds in the economic and governance policy arena in Nigeria — Soludo, as a professor of economics, former Chief Economic Adviser to the President, and former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN); and El-Rufai as former Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), a member of the Economic Management Team (EMT) and a member of the Policy Implementation Committee under General Abdulsalami Abubakar.

Other speakers will also bring to bear their rich and varied backgrounds in the private sector, international development, policy advisory, and research. Aig-Imoukhuede, founder of the African Initiative for Governance (AIF), will explore the imperatives of collaboration between the public and private sector; Dr. Shubham Chaudhuri, also a former professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York, will identify lessons from countries with similar size and challenges as Nigeria; and Dr. Zainab Usman will draw from her academic research, her work as the pioneer director of the Carnegie Africa Program, and her stint working on different countries at the World Bank.