Nigeria: Investment Growth – FG Seeks Synergy With Private Sector

The Federal Government is seeking a stronger partnership with the organised private sector to resolve barriers associated with doing business in Nigeria, to help ensure sustainable growth in trade and investment.

The Minister of Trade and Investment, Mr. Olusegun Aganga, who stated this weekend at the September Breakfast Meeting of the Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce, said it is time the private sector stopped highlighting challenges confronting businesses in the country and form a formidable partnership with the ministry’s business and investment committees to resolve the issues.

“We always talk about policy summersaults, multiple taxation and other issues we believe are impeding the process of doing business, why waste time, why not think of how to resolve them? What the private sector should be interested in is how to form groups and brainstorm on the solutions to these perceived challenges and make recommendations to government. Government cannot do everything but it will create enabling environments for the private sector to thrive,” he said.

Aganga noted that any investor who wants to stake his investment in any country must think of the market, raw materials, capital and technology which according to him, with about 160 million Nigerians, the country has great potentials and opportunities for investors.

Noting that in order to create more investment opportunities for the country, the ministry has established trade and investment desk in Nigeria’s foreign missions to seek investment in foreign lands.

“We have so many Nigerians in Diaspora, we are not asking them to come back but we are going to partner with them to facilitate the growth of investment in Diaspora,” the minister noted.

The chairman of council of the Nigerian-British Chamber of Commerce, Architect Thomas Awagu, earlier in an address, said that in spite of the continued efforts to create a congenial operating business environment for businesses to thrive, there appears to be a number of persisting business policy issues currently spanning the realm of transactions cost, policy summersaults, administrative and avoidable bureaucracy, conflicts in legislations, multiple taxation, delays in processing court cases and enforcement of decisions, also, ports congestion, the tariff structure and poor conduct of trade policy, infrastructural deficiencies, crisis of confidence in the Nigerian business environment, among others.

Awagu noted that trading statistics between Nigeria and Britain have been skewed largely in favour of the later.

“The volume of trade between Nigeria and the UK last year in terms of export from UK was 1.3 billion Pounds, while import from Nigeria to UK stood at 600 million pounds, with most of their imports being in the oil and gas sectors. Nigeria is the UK’s 33rd largest overseas market and the second largest in Africa. We must therefore work to reduce this gap. We must work to ensure that the majority of our exports are no longer raw materials and semi-finished goods in order to maximise the economic benefits,” he said.