Nigeria Gets $6 Billion In Foreign Direct Investments Yearly
In a report by the News Agency of Nigeria, the director said this at a media chat organised by Olisa Agbakoba legal services.
It is on record that the World Bank report ranked Nigeria 170th out of 186 countries surveyed on enabling business environment.
Sakaba noted that the statistics on FDI inflow showed that Nigeria still ranked as one of the leading FDI destinations in the world.
The director stressed that Nigeria was daily being inundated with enquiries by prospective foreign investors adding that the report could not have been a true reflection of the Nigerian situation.
In his speech, the director said that the NIPC had already made it designed many initiatives to which were capable of luring foreign investors into the country noting that one of such designs was the granting of pioneer status to about 450 start-up companies since NIPC was established 16 years ago.
To this end, Sakaba noted that a group of French investors had just visited the country to explore investment opportunities as others are currently in Abuja.
However, Sakaba described pioneer status as legal concession by government to support the growth of start-up businesses particularly in the heat of challenges.
He said that the NIPC had also established a one-stop-investment centre to address challenges of individual prospective investors.
“The centre provided a platform for 26 government regulatory agencies to address challenges of individual prospective foreign investor. The NIPC was also assisting states in building capacity to support foreign investors in their states,” the director said.
Sakaba said that the NIPC laws were enabling enough because they provided for reforms.
The director noted that there was the need to build a national consensus on the way forward to promote inflow of foreign direct investments into the country in view of the myriad institutional challenges.
On his part, Will Mamah, the development law consultant of the Olise Agbakoba legal services, said that Nigeria had been hit by a “tsunami” of big shocks arising from the decline in crude oil price globally.
He said that the fact that the world had shifted from small hydrocarbon oil to clean shale oil had made Nigeria’s hydrocarbon-based resource unfashionable.
Mamah said: “Nigeria’s potential as an investment hub is very high, but remains largely untapped.
“Two questions are critical: why has Nigeria’s investment promise been unable to deliver the expected results?”
Meanwhile, the group managing director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Ibe Kachikwu, said at the ministerial screening today, October 14, that President Muhamamdu Buhari has stated that he would not be tempted to remove petroleum subsidy until full measures are in place to cushion the effect of such removal.
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