ABSTRACT:

Conceptually, this paper sees privatization as the transfer of government owned shareholding in designated enterprises to private shareholders. Thus, the general aims of privatization as projected by the paper include improving efficiency as well as investment prospects for the privatized industries. Given also the specified objectives of privatization to include—lessening the dominance of unproductive investment in the public sector, improving the sector's efficiency,
intensifying the growth potential of the private sector, trimming down the size of the public sector and reducing, to some extent, the country's fiscal problem; the paper believes that a well-conceived privatization can obviously attract substantial investment to privatized industries, and indeed, the economy as a whole.
Through industrial investment generated from privatization, increased employment and decreased poverty can be achieved. Using a model of labour demand function, small/medium and large scale enterprises based on cross sectional primary data were related in separate scenarios to derive employment elasticity and how that affects labour absorption in Nigeria as a whole. The result associated with the model of small/medium scale enterprises was satisfactory as industrial capital investment was seen to generate substantial increase in labour demand. In particular, for Akwa Ibom State to attain sustainable growth and development through privatization, the state government among other things, should create enabling environment to attract domestic and foreign industrial investment, promote relative peace and harmony in the state, improve infrastructures relating to roads, energy and communication, embark on technical capacity building, provide and encourage other national and international bodies to extend micro credit/microfinance scheme to low income people, set up State Industrial Development Authority to oversee the unprivatized government initiated industries.