Vice President Atiku Abubakar has blamed massive exodus of Nigerian professionals from the country on the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) introduced in the country in the mid 1980s.

In his opening remarks at the Harvard Executive Programme on 'Making Markets Work' held at the University of Witwatersrand Graduate Business School, on Tues-day in Johannesburg, South Africa, Atiku said that one of the lessons of SAP was that 'governments must be armed with sufficient scientific data and appropriate strategies to deal with the complexity of economic reforms'.

'The greatest damage done to the economy as a result of the Structural Adjustment Programme was the massive migration of the qualitative manpower out of the country to major centres of knowledge in the world," the Southern Africa correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) quotes Atiku as saying in his paperen titled 'The Challenge for African Markets'.

The vice president, who was represented by Nigeria's High Commissioner in South Africa, Dr Tunji Olagunju, said that SAP also placed 'strains on the already complex structural divides of our society as well as deepen the dualistic nature of the economy'.

According to him, the role of government was not only to create a level-playing field by putting in place the appropriate regulatory frame-works, it must also have the responsibility to ensure that policy thrusts do not exacerbate the structural divides of the society.

Atiku said that a multi-sectoral approach to economic reforms would also have to deal with the informal sectors of African economies, which are the very location of the dominant consumers in the market.

He said that the neglect of certain networks of informal economic activities currently outside the existing realms of economic data insulated them from the instability that often characterised the formal sector of the economy.

'It could be argued that the very existence of this (informal) market is a testimony to the decades of disastrous policy thrusts by governments which have marginalised these economic groups,' Atiku said.

The vice president said that despite the introduction of more liberalisation policies, the market remained defined by the exclusive attitude of the business class, with signs of competition merely confined to a few players and a limited sector of the economy, and that the market had done more to open up the extremes of poverty and wealth within the African economies.

'In fact, it is difficult to describe the consumer as the king in African markets in spite of economic liberalisation,' Atiku said, adding that for the consumer to have a choice, the market must be further democratised to a limit permissible under national experience.

Atiku said that African markets should enforce a minimum market climate of what constitutes a just price for goods and services in a decent society, while governments should continue to create a market-friendly environment to enable Africans and research institutions to become owners of concepts and creative skills.