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The Nigeria Government will attract $22 billion private sector investments through the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) “Focused Laboratories” in two years, Budget and National Planning Minister, Senator Udoma Udo Udoma has said.
According to the Minister, Nigerians may have to wait for that period before reaping the fruit of foreign investments.
Speaking in Bali, Indonesia, at the launch of the Sub Sahara Africa Regional Economic Outlook, he explained that the government, through the ERGP planned to create about 15 million jobs by 2020.
The minister added:“We intend to achieve this principally through stimulating the private sector.Our aim is to make Nigeria a more investment-friendly place, a more attractive place for people to do business.
“We have conducted sector specific labs, which we referred to as the ERGP Focus Labs, to bring potential investors and government officials together to seek to remove the bottlenecks and impediments impeding investment projects.
“We identified over $22 billion of potential investments which could be unlocked, if we can remove some of these impediments,” he said.
Udoma said in Nigeria, the government was forced to cut down its growth projections for this year from three per cent to 2.1 per cent due to oil production challenges in the second quarter of the year.
He said it would take at least two years for the full manifestation of the investment potential of the EPRG of the Federal Government.
“I think it will take one or two years before they actually come to fruition.
“However, government has set up a crack team of four experts who were recruited to work with stakeholders in the private sector on ways to actually have the expected investors come in under the economic plan”, the minister said.
On foreign investments, Udoma agreed with the advice of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that Nigeria must put in place sound macro-economic policy to mitigate risks associated with volatile capital flows.
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