President Goodluck Jonathan on Thursday inaugurated the National Council on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

The President charged the council members to expand the frontiers of MSME, which he said was key to job creation in the country and needed for the country to attain “self-sufficiency.”

At the inauguration which took place at the presidential villa, Abuja, Jonathan also appointed Vice President Namadi Sambo as the Chairman of the council.

The President said, “This council shall have the mandate to develop, support, and grow small businesses in Nigeria. To underline the importance of this council, I have asked the Vice President to chair the council because of its strategic importance on small business development and the economy of the country at large.

“A National Technical Implementation Committee will be chaired by the Honourable Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, to serve the National Council on MSMEs and fast-track the implementation of its mandate.”

He also expressed hope that in addition to the 10 states where MSME councils had already been set up, the MSME structure would soon be set up in other states of the federation.

He charged members of the council to make its priority the clearing of all encumbrances denying small business owners easy access to the N220bn provided by the Central Bank for the MSME purpose.

The President said, “The N220bn MSME fund provided by the Central Bank which I launched a few weeks ago for small businesses, will begin to address access to finance for small businesses, and NEDEP will play a role to ensuring that MSMEs in the country are bankable and viable enough to access these funds, as well as other MSME funds available.

“An urgent priority I expect this Council to take up, is the development of a detailed Financing Value Chain Intervention strategy for MSMEs, so as to address the difficulties put in the way of small businesses in their strive to access finance.”

He described Nigeria as having “the ninth largest work force in the world” and its people among “the most enterprising in the world”.

He added, “A 2010 survey carried out by SMEDAN and the National Bureau of Statistics, shows that there were 17.2 million MSMEs in Nigeria, employing over 32 million people.

“In addition, over 95 per cent of registered businesses in Nigeria are small businesses. If each of these businesses employs one more person, we would create over 17 million extra jobs, which would indeed be a revolution in Nigeria’s job markets. This is the unexplored power of small businesses.