 I bring you warm greetings from His Excellency President Mohammad Buhari, GCFR, who has asked me to represent him at this ceremony. Although I have attended the International Trade Fair years ago, a good number of times. But having lived and served in Lagos for a great deal of my life, in fact, practically all my life. I don't know the time when I wasn't living in Lagos except for this period when I've been in Apuja. But I must confess that any time I'm given an assignment to be in Lagos, I'm always very willing to accept it. Very, very willing to accept. And in particular, this is a very good assignment because it will also mean that I might score a few good points with my wife who, you know, had already said to me that going to this trade fair, there will be nice Christmas shopping and everything at a discount. So I'm really looking forward to doing a few rounds here. So on behalf of the President and my wife, you know, I want to commend the leadership of the prestigious Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Babatunde Rwashi, and Mr. Muda Yusuf, the Director General, and Mr. Gabriel Idahosa, Chairman of the Trade Promotion Board, for organizing what has become the leading forum for trade and business promotion in Nigeria in the past 32 years. I'm told that this edition of the trade fair is hosting over 200 foreign exhibitors from several countries across the world. And that is estimated that over 500,000 visitors will attend in the next 10 days of the fair. So I must therefore welcome all of our guests from all over the world. I'm told we're having guests from Republic of Benin, Cameroon, China, Egypt, and even countries of the European Union, Japan, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey. Well, everyone, welcome to Nigeria, the largest market in Africa. No less important are the Nigerian businesses here at this fair. From our large enterprises to our micro, small, and medium enterprises, all residents are driving Nigeria's economic growth by contributing just under 50% of the gross domestic product and employing over 80% of our country's entire local force. The convergence of such business enterprise, investment, and trade all in one place is what makes the Lagos International Trade Fair a must attend. The fair creates opportunities for local and foreign investments with a brand promise of connecting businesses and creating value for the over 5,000 businesses I'm told have registered to be here at the fair. Government has been consistently committed. And when I say government, I refer not just to the federal government but also to the Lagos State Government, that has been a very worthy partner in all of the economic efforts of the federal government. And government has been committed to policies and reform efforts geared at enhancing diversification and structural reform of the economy through massive investments in infrastructure and human capital. These policies have successfully enhanced productivity, increased in the share of manufacturing in Nigeria's total export earnings, and a drastic reduction in our susceptibilities to shocks, such as our economy has been frequently exposed to on account of commodity volatility, which we face constantly. Our focus on infrastructure extends to both hard and soft infrastructure, particularly trade facilitation, quality infrastructure, and the ease of doing business reforms. We've taken on the key infrastructure challenges that have stifled SME growth and development in the country by seeking innovative ways to bridge the significant infrastructure gap and at the same time creating an enabling environment in which business can thrive even better. Since 2016, in two budget cycles, we've spent 2.7 trillion in capital and mostly on infrastructure. This is the largest capital spend in our nation's history. And this is despite the fact that the country has earned 60 percent less than in the previous five years. We've focused on roads, power, and on a new national rail network, amongst others. The Lagos Canal Rail, which starts from the Lagos Port, is an important infrastructure for us because we expect that the Lagos Ibadu end of it will be completed by the end of the year. But once it is completed, especially because it starts from the port, it will greatly relieve our roads from a lot of the trucks that go from point to point, especially from the Lagos Port out into the west of Nigeria and then to the farthest point of Nigeria. Once we have a rail service, especially for cargo, that takes goods from the ports out of Lagos, it will significantly impact a lot of the problems that we're seeing today, even the congestion that we're seeing at the ports. We've also looked at power and amongst other things we'll try to ramp up power generation from about 3,000, which it was in 2015, to about 70,000 megahertz. But one of the most important things about power, of course, is that using our national grid as we have been doing, it is possible, it is impossible for us to satisfy the power needs. And that's the reason why, under our eligible customer declaration, we have now decided that individual power companies, beg your pardon, and these are not necessarily the privatized discourse or genocles. Power companies by themselves can supply power to wheeling buyers. So we have a situation now where, under our Energizing Economics Initiative, which has been implemented by the REA, to provide clean, stable, affordable electricity to Nigerians in various economic clusters and markets. So today, I've just picked thousands of shops in Sabangari, in Kano, Arariya market in Abang, Isikon market in Akure, and two other markets in Dostei, a Daikan market in Benin, Dostei, and just last week, the Surab market in Lagos have been provided with solar power through this initiative. Now it's important, and it's important to emphasize why this is important, why this is particularly impactful. Because in the past, we had to rely on the grid. It was the national grid that we relied on for all our power, and the discos and gengos that are currently, who currently carry our power, generate our power and carry our power. Now, private companies are providing their own power and IPP agreements that are endorsed by the federal government so that they can provide power independently to industry and independently even for domestic use in homes around the country. We expect that this new approach will drastically reduce the problems that we have at the moment with power supply. All the markets that I've mentioned are now connected to hundreds of megahertz of independent mini-gigs, and this creates value by allowing the longer hours of doing business, quality storage, or preservation of goods, reduce fuel expenses, and all of that. We're also currently facilitating an innovative product being rolled out by Google Incorporated, the world's leading provider of internet services and some leading Nigerian private internet service providers. Earlier on this year, I took a team of people to Silicon Valley who visited Google, and one of the key achievements of that visit was what they call the Google Station. Now, the Google Station is something that was done in India where all Indian railway stations have free Wi-Fi, so you can use your Wi-Fi and have data and all of that in all the railway stations. Railway stations are very huge, massive places, so what we asked them to do, and which they've now done, is to provide free Wi-Fi in public places for us as well. So we now have Google stations also already there in six different locations, they're in the Palm Shopping Mall, Landmark Center, Unilike, MM2, the domestic airport, Computer Village, and the Kedja City Mall. But for us, the more interesting part of this is that we're asking them to roll out in markets across Nigeria. So in the next few months, they will be in Onitsha, the main market in Baguio, in Putou Market in Abel Puta, in the Kaduna Central Market, Surah Market, and Lagos Abuja International Airport, by the end of the year. We think that by democratizing access to the internet in this way, especially in public places and in markets, so many more people can do their business, and so many more people can receive information, and this information can really be cheaply delivered to them. Furthermore, we've been building an enabling business environment, and this has already been mentioned in quite some detail. But we think that this is pivotal for the enhancement of efficiency and fostering transparency, and enabling business environment is critical. I'm certain that some of our guests today might have benefited from our enhanced electronic visa process, which allows any eligible business traveler coming into Nigeria to attain a pre-approved visa within 48 hours of applying and meeting the conditions. This is an addition to the renewed mandate of a 48-hour visa processing timeline across all our missions abroad. So what we're able to do today is that many of those who come into Nigeria can get visa on arrival, and that process is one that has been tried and tested, and we intend that we should bring it down to a T so that it's extremely smooth, and as it's been done in other places in the world, you don't necessarily, especially where you're a business traveler, you can come into the country and get your visa and go about your business easily. We've also been working closely with MDAs to deliver on business reforms that cut across multiple processes from business incorporation to the payment of taxes to property registration, obtaining construction permits and licenses, getting credit from financial institutions, all the way to business insolvency and corporate rescue. Business owners can now incorporate companies through the online company registration portal within 24 hours. In a bid to encourage more micro and small enterprises to join the formal sector, the CAC is now running a special 90-day window where businesses, name registrations, have been heavily discounted. So you can register your businesses now for 5,009, but this offer only lasts till the 31st of December 2018. So if you don't take advantage of it between, it started October 1st, if you don't take advantage of it before the end of the year, then that window closes. Tax payments and remittances have also been simplified through the e-filing system by the FRS. Importers and exporters are also not left out. As the documentation required for imports and exports have been significantly reduced from 14 to 8 and 10 to 7, respectively. We still have loads of problems with the import and export procedure and we are working on that. And one of the reasons why we're trying to establish what we call the national trade platform or the single window for imports and exports is because we can significantly reduce the time it takes and the trouble it takes to bring in goods and clear them and also to export if we have this single window. And we hope that we'll be able to launch that single window in a few months. It's been delayed due to issues that concern the individual ministries and MDAs trying to align all their various electronic platforms. And we're working on all of that and we hope we'll be able to deliver very shortly. As part of our efforts to foster value creation by extending micro-credit to small businesses under our government empowerment and enterprise program, GIP or Trader Money. This is a product we give where we give an interest-free loan. And this is created specifically for petty traders and artisans across Nigeria. By partnering with a Nigerian firm of very young people called Softlaw, an indigenous technology company, with a mobile wallet, over 1.8 million people have registered and have received their mobile wallets. The loans are disbursed directly to the mobile phones of the beneficiaries without the need for a bank account. But the banks also want to get into this and they want bank accounts open. But what we've done is that so far we've opened about 349,000 bank accounts on account of this GIP or Trader Money scheme. So that we're able to bring in even petty traders, informal traders, into the formal economy. And when they open their bank accounts, we can access them with financial literacy training. We can access them with even new financial products, including insurance. 15.2 billion interest-free loans ranging from 50,000 to 350,000 has been disbursed to over 400,000 market traders, artisans across the 36 states of the Federation. And over 56 percent of these have been given specifically to women. So women have benefited immensely from this. In addition, we're extending what we call the market money to 2 million, 2 million traders across the country. Nigerian businesses coming from outside Lagos are also not left out. In July 2017, in response to a strong feedback from stakeholders across the country, chronicling the challenges that they face, especially with regulatory procedures, intellectual property issues, Pepeg launched the homegrown indicator, which is called trading within Nigeria. The objective of this indicator is to make internal trade simpler and easier, especially for small businesses. So through this indicator, regulatory challenges that face businesses, such as the challenges that businesses face with NAFDAQ, SOM, with the trademark registry are being tackled strategically. The government has also committed to what I believe is the right policy and regulatory framework for doing business in Nigeria by ensuring, for instance, that there are no restrictions on company ownership, as well as the availability of a 100 percent perpetration of capital and profits when a foreign company sets up in Nigeria. Our Pioneer Status Program also offers applicable tax holidays for eligible businesses, and according to the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission, we've received about 81 applications in the past one year for business interests in manufacturing, real estate, power, ICT, telecoms, etc. We've taken a practical approach to the regulatory environment, so ensuring that regulators understand their role as facilitators, not obstacles to business, and we've seen a great deal of improvement. The future of our economy, we must emphasize that the future of our economy, especially in the next few years, will depend a great deal on technology and the creative industry, including fashion and entertainment. So we need to be ahead in policy formulation. To this end, the president asked me to chair the Technology and Creativity Advisory Group. Now the Technology and Creativity Advisory Group is a group really of practitioners in the technology sector, most of them young men and women who have set up businesses, payment systems, fintech, all manner of very innovative businesses, and many who are in entertainment and fashion as well. The idea of this advisory group is to bring them formally into the policy making sector, so that they meet with me regularly, have with health, formatting so far, where we're trying to formulate policies that would affect the technology industry, affect the creative industry, technology that would affect entertainment and fashion as a policy variable that would affect entertainment and fashion as we go forward. And this is a very exciting process because a lot of what we're seeing will simply have to develop new policies. For example, if you look at the payment systems that people have developed today, of these young men and women who are making payments in various currencies across the world, enabling payments to be made easily and all of that. The banks of course are jittery, the banks are worried that have these people also become banks, are they not going to take our lunch away and all of that. So we need to formulate policies that enable the fintech companies to operate, enable the banks to operate, and where we need to give fresh licenses of different types of licenses, we need to be able to define how those will be done. So it's a new and exciting phase in policy development because of the disruptive technologies and the new things that very many young men and women are bringing into economy today. So for example, the regulatory and pre-investment agencies also, and this is part of what we're trying to do with ensuring that regulatory agencies respond positively and that they are not obstacles. NAFDAQ, for example, has been able to clear a backlog today of almost 5,000 approvals that were outstanding. What we've done is that we've taken NAFDAQ, SOM, and all of them around the what we call our MSME clinics. We've held about 20 so far, I've attended 18 of those clinics across the country, in 20 states, a bunch of about 18 of them. What we do is that we take NAFDAQ along with us, we take SOM, we take CAC, FRS, everybody, including the Bank of industry, they meet with the MSMEs. The MSMEs, they talk about the various problems they have and all of that. But these regulatory agencies are ready also to answer some of the questions on the spot and do whatever is required to be done on the spot. What we've also done is that in many states we have established one-stop centers. So you have in some of the states of the federation now a one-stop center where NAFDAQ, SOM, CAC, and all of that are under one roof. So that individuals who are doing business, small businesses, don't have to travel all the way to Apuja or Lagos each time just to be able to get a few things done. So that's something we'll try to do. So it's quite clear that we are not only creating and enabling environment for business, but we're also trying to encourage local and foreign businesses to take advantage of all of the opportunities that we offer and to connect and create value. As I close, let me again thank the leadership members of the Chamber of Commerce for their commitment to Nigeria's economic development by advocating for improved business policies and by always being there to challenge what government is doing, to look at some of the issues very closely, to attend the Waterloo Business Forum, which is a forum where we debate the issues, we criticize what government is doing and people say, you know, what they say, what they like to see. And the Chamber of Commerce has been a very active and credible partner in driving these policies and I want to thank you very much for doing so. And I want to say also that at the end of the day, the business environment depends on what the private sector does. It depends almost entirely on what the private sector does. How you engage with government, how you engage with policymakers is what determines how the business environment is going to look. If we pay attention to what government is doing, the business environment will be better. If we don't pay attention to what government is doing, we are the worst for it. So the collaboration between the private and the public sector is an absolutely important collaboration and we'll try to open all of the different opportunities for doing so and we intend to continue to open those doors to enable that collaboration to thrive. So on behalf of His Excellency, the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President Mohamed Ibrahim, it is my very special pleasure and privilege to declare open the Lagos International Trade Fair. Thank you.