NIPC seeks agency coordination for investment promotion

The Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) regrets that the lack of a coordinated and effective monitoring system has largely left the Nigerian investment community in a state of confusion.

According to the NIPC, “the country’s investment promotion push is mostly dispersed, robbing us of the cohesive leverage we could have obtained if we synergized our efforts and resources.”

Seratu Umar, the executive secretary of the NIPC, made the remarks during her speech at an Abuja stakeholder engagement conference with State Investment Promotion Agencies.

In order to ensure that the nation’s investment promotion drive is given traction to onboard investments into different sectors of the country in an effort to facilitate economic growth, job creation, import substitution, foreign exchange generation, and others, she said that the NIPC’s central and strategic role in the coordination of all investment promotion should, therefore, be activated.

According to her, a well-coordinated ecosystem that guarantees complementary functions for national and subnational Investment Promotion Agencies [IPAs] is essential to preventing issues for investors throughout the nation later on.

She said that,  “All stakeholders in the investment promotion ecosystem ought to work in synergy and complement our mandates and competences to facilitate a national investment promotion campaign under the National Investment Promotion Master Plan which will also holistically, accommodate investment opportunities at the State levels’’.

She pledged that the Commission will increase its capacity-building efforts for investment functionaries at the sub-national levels and develop a standardization template for the collection of investment-grade project, data, and information on business-enabling reforms that will feed into a dashboard developed and residing at the NIPC.

In her contribution, Rosemary Ekong, Director-General of the Cross River State Investment Promotion Bureau, stated that the issue of the long-standing lack of synergy between State IPAs and the NIPC needs urgent attention in order to be quickly resolved in order to facilitate the much-needed Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) to Nigeria.

For his part, Kelvin Uwaibi, the managing director of the Edo State Investment Promotion Office, encouraged the NIPC to update its website so that IPAs could have access to regular information required for the promotion of investments.