BENIN CITY- Edo State Governor Mr. Godwin Obaseki said his government will engage with VLISCO Group for support in the area of skill acquisition drive to help the state reduce the challenges of the scourge of trafficking and human slavery witnessed in the state.
He said this while receiving top management of the group led by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) David Suddens who were on a courtesy visit to government house in Benin City, the Edo State Capital.
Obaseki said the concern for his administration is to develop skills and create the environment to attract business to the state and engaged the youths with jobs to discourage them from seeking greener pasture abroad.
“As a government, our plan is to first attract business to the state by taking advantages of our strategic location as a logistic hub and also create the environment for business to locate”.
“We have a young population of about 4.5 million people, 60 per cent under the age of 25 years wants to travel and unfortunately they make use of our strategic positioning but working with European Union (EU) and other international partners who are asking us to come with proposal and are ready to support and help create industries and job for our young people to ensure they stay back and be gainfully employed”.
He said his administration will leverage on the comparative advantage of the strategic location of the state to attrack investors. “The advantage put the state in proximity of a market of about 60 million people”.
Earlier, the CEO of VLISCO David Suddens said his organization is known for the production of Dutch wax saying their presence here in Nigeria is not sufficient enough with just four retail store but optimistic it can grow to 50.
He said their vision is to grow cotton here in Nigeria and export to Holland. He added that his group hopes to have a printing mill here in the country with Nigeria designers, designing and printing for Nigeria consumers using high digital printing technology.
“We have our retail store for now and it can be grown to 50 over a period o time. We have plans to develop the tailoring skills here in Nigeria” he concluded.
