New Telegraph

NSIA boss: National investment should concern everyone

The Chief Executive Officer, Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), Mr. Uche Orji, has said that how the authority handles its investments should rightly be the business of every citizen.

The NSIA boss, who stated this while featuring on a monitored TV interview recently, stressed that the country’s huge infrastructure deficit was an issue that the country must find creative ways of tackling. According to him, “we need to turn infrastructure into investable assets that have more economic values as opposed to just doing the roads, leaving it and not monetising it. “The idea is to package the project as investment entities and offer them to investors.

Looking at Lagos- Ibadan Expressway, I did a tour of it recently and I could see an incredibly profitable project; but it’s just being allowed to waste. So the essence of this is to turn infrastructure into investable assets.” He noted that the National Pension Funds will be critical to boosting national infrastructure investment, if well managed. He said: “National investment is everybody’s business.

Pensions funds will invest, NSIA will invest and it is also open for individuals and organisations to invest because we believe these are all profitable projects.” He pointed out that when the projects were being developed and designed, with the intention to fund them from the national pension funds, all relevant stakeholders, including the Pension commission, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Debt Management Office (DMO), Ministry of Finance amongst others, were present in the room.

“We need to realise that this was not done in isolation and the outcome was to turn infrastructure into investible assets. “This is an investment opportunity and not an attempt to raid or grab the pension funds. All these are still talked about and worked on; none of them is operational yet.”

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