Senate President David Mark yesterday appealed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to make its economic and financial policies friendly to Africa, contending that a policy, which does not work for a supposed beneficiary, is unnecessary.
Senator Mark made this when he received the visiting IMF managing director, Christine Lagarde, in Abuja yesterday.
He said, “The impression people have about IMF is that of an organisation that prescribes an economic solution that hardly works or practicable in any country.
“It is a challenge for the IMF to disabuse our minds by making its economic policies practicable. The policies could be laudable but it sometimes does not fit into local arrangements. You must take cognisance of local situations in your prescriptions because a uniform policy may not work for all nations.”
He further told his guests, which included finance minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Central Bank governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, that European countries should make their markets accessible to Africans.
“Our markets are accessible to you, but yours (Europe) are not accessible to us. This imbalance of trade is not good; you should make effort to give us some levels of accessibility to your market,” Mark requested, and asked the IMF to put necessary measures in place to ameliorate the shock on the nation’s economy resulting from the crisis in the European economy.
Earlier, Lagarde had briefed the principal officers of the Senate on the global economic trend and asked developing nations to put safety measures in place to contain the shock from the economic crisis in Europe in order to avoid the ripple effects of the meltdown.
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