• Enelamah, Onyeama woo foreign investors

Stories from Aidoghie Paulinus, New York

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah, has said President Muhammadu Buhari is obsessed with infrastructure deficit in the country.

The minister spoke at the Nigeria-United States Business Investment Forum held in New York on the sideline of the ongoing 72nd United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).  Commenting, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, who represented President Buhari, said the Nigeria had in stock, a lot of incentives for foreign investors.

He said the incentives were an enabling business environment and initiatives, one-stop-shop for registration of names for getting passport into the country and customs clearances. Other incentives, according to Onyeama, were a huge market of almost 193 million people, a bigger market with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), good governance and assured security.

Speaking during the interactive session, Enelamah said infrastructure was very central to the current administration. He added that Nigeria is a welcoming business destination to foreign investors, promising that the Nigeria the outside world sees today would not be the Nigeria of tomorrow.

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He said: “I wanted to summarise three or four themes that have been sort of said in different forms, but I think it is a message that must not be lost to this audience. The first one is the centrality of infrastructure to this government and to just sort of our game plan for the country. We have a president that is much focused, even obsessed with the infrastructure deficit and making sure it is addressed.

“It is important to note that because it represents both opportunity for investment, as well as frankly, for those of you that are strategic in thinking about your investment, you could almost factor that in, in terms of ease of doing business, and the enabling environment and the infrastructure we will inevitably create.”

The minister added that any analyst that looked upon what is happening in the country would attest to the fact that the efforts being made by the government would inevitably change the infrastructure landscape dramatically.

“And anybody who is an analyst, or anybody who follows Nigeria and looks at all that is going on, I mean, we have talked about the rails, the concession with GE, the arrangements with the Chinese over new roads construction, the things that are going on with the airport concessions that have been announced worth sharing and all those we are doing with our Aviation Minister and so on, and the work we are doing with special economic zones, the huge amount of resources that are going into power, and I think these efforts, in my considered view, would inevitably change the infrastructure landscape in Nigeria dramatically,” Enelamah added.

Speaking with Daily Sun, the founder and Chief Executive Officer, Atlas Merchant Capital, Bob Diamond, said the forum was one of a shared feeling. “There is a shared feeling that in the last year, a number of things around security, around the economy, around currency level have improved; the micro environment has improved and there is a real partnership between the ministries that are here and the businesses and investors that are here,” Diamond said.