‘Govt Needs To Create An Enabling Environment For Investments Inflow, Not Necessarily Throwing Cash At Whatever Problem’ – Okezie-Okafor
The Oasis Reporters
July 11, 2024
By Moses Okezie-Okafor Esq
At a Twitter chat on unlocking funds for investments and economic growth, Moses Okezie-Okafor posits that what the government really needs to do is to create an enabling environment for Investments inflow, not necessarily going out to seek for funds that may not help a country’s balance of payments position.
This was on the backdrop of the realization that a World Bank data report stated that Nigerians in the diaspora remittances home was almost $20 billion in 2023.
“The phrase and numerous others like it that there is something extraordinary that ‘the government has to do’, are cop-outs at best and excuses at worst.
“I say it again that the government, if it has to at all, only has to create an enabling environment, and not necessarily the funding or other factors for anyone to do business.
“ Go and watch ‘The Men Who Built America’ and see how scientists, industrialists and pioneers like Edison, Rockefeller and Ford built their country while obsessed with building their businesses and companies in the hey days after the American Civil War.
“They also lacked electricity, security, etc in those days. In fact, Edison had to invent electricity generation and distribution, Rockefeller built railway lines to move his products and Ford, mass mobility via automobiles, along with the assembly lines to mass produce them.
“Even in modern times, it’s still the people, and not the government, building the country. For instance, the US government may have conceived and developed the idea and socio-legal frameworks for Silicon Valley, but private equity, tech pioneers and their companies, venture capitalists and angel investors came on board and built it into the global center for high technology and innovation that it is today.
“If the Nigerian diaspora has conversations with itself, they can take the knowledge, strategies and monies they have amassed in the Western World and bring it home to show us the way.
“The @NGRPresident will give them enough land for a State today if they show full, functional cause, and if he doesn’t, they can always purchase land from 500,000 hectares to 4,110 square kilometers (the entire area of Dubai), build a Dubai over the next 2 decades – and show us how it is done.
PS: President @officialABAT has the building of new cities (much like Eko Atlantic City) in his #RenewedHopeManifesto and I’m sure he will happily oblige such a request.
“In conclusion, the government has policy-making obligations and the private sector business development obligations under the policies. Anything else is an imposition or a cop-out”.
