The House of Representatives has pledged to create an enabling environment for entrepreneurial excellence and Small and Medium Enterprises in the country to thrive.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Abbas Tajudeen, said this while declaring open an entrepreneurial summit at the second Youth Engagement for 2025 in Abuja on Monday.

Mr Tajudeen said that Nigerian entrepreneurs were not bereft of ideas but only lacked thriving environments.

“Nigeria’s entrepreneurs have never lacked ideas. They have never lacked courage. What they have lacked, too often, is a system designed to match their energy. A system where access, information, capital and public policy move in the same direction,” he said.

According to the speaker, potential does not translate into prosperity unless the environment is intentionally structured to support it.

He therefore said that the summit was an attempt to close that gap deliberately and structurally, with strong institutional backing from the Office of the Speaker.

Mr Tajudeen said that the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu had placed an enterprise at the centre of national transformation.

The speaker reiterated the legislature’s determination to lead by ensuring that the rules of the economy are coherent and aligned with the realities of a population that is innovative and impatient for progress.

Mr Tajudeen, who called for a shift from promise-driven support to data-driven impact, said that for decades, national economic discourse has suffered from an overdose of optimism and an underdose of measurement.

He identified the Enterprise Grant being introduced as a bold step that would be judged not by the size of the cheques, but by the number of viable businesses stabilised.

He said: ‘This summit, therefore, is not an event; it is an invitation — an invitation to coordinate, to commit and to innovate.”

The chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Buba Marwa, saluted the young people’s enormous creativity, energy and potential.

Mr Marwa regretted the avoidable rise in threats of drugs and substance abuse among the youth. He expressed worry over the consequences of such rising drug abuse, saying that it has undermined the prospects and futures of the country.

Mr Marwa said that the 2018 UN Office on Drugs and Crime National Drug Use Survey has provided evidence that must continue to inform legislative and policy action.

According to him, the findings show that 14.4 per cent of Nigerians aged 15 to 64, about 14.3 million people, used psychoactive substances in 2017.

Mr Marwa said that the prevalence is almost triple the global average, placing Nigeria among the countries with the highest burden of drug use.

The NDLEA boss reeled out the retardation effects of drugs on national growth. He identified the Green Chamber as a strategic partner in shaping a Nigeria where young entrepreneurs led innovation.

(NAN)