G20: Tinubu leads Nigerian business leaders to India to drive investments

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu will lead a delegate of influential business people to the G20 summit in India next week in attempts to promote foreign investment in Africa’s largest economy and mobilize global capital to develop infrastructure, his spokesman said in a briefing.

“The focus of the summit will be heavily predicated on the urgent need to attract foreign direct investment and to ensure that we are able to mobilize private capital from around the world toward the development of Nigeria’s public infrastructure,”Ajuri Ngelale said in Abuja, the nation’s capital.

The summit in India will hold on Sept 9 and 10.

President Tinubu began a swat of reforms hailed by investors as the boldest in decades but the reforms have lead to additional hardship to Nigerians already dealing with a high cost of living. The president scrapped fuel subsidies that had made pump prices among the cheapest in the world, pushing prices to more than tripled since the subsidies were abolished on May 29, exacerbating a cost-of-living crisis in the west African nation.

“In addition to that, we are focused on engagements that will be dealing with critical sectors of the national economy, involving steel development, electricity generation, transmission and distribution, shipyard building capacity,” he said said.

Business leaders including Aliko Dangote, Tony Elumelu, Abdul Sama Rabiu, Bola Shagaya and Folorunsho Alakija, among others are among the delegates heading to the Asian country to try and secure investments to the coyntry. The president will meet leaders from Brazil, India, South Korea and Germany, as well as business leaders in India on the sidelines of the G20, Ngelale said.

Earlier in the week, finance minister Wale Edun said the country is focusing on attracting investments instead of relying on borrowing to run the country as the administration tries to revive the nation.

President Tinubu inherited a struggling economy with record debt, shortages of foreign exchange and fuel, a weak naira currency, inflation at a near two-decade high, irregular power supplies and falling oil production due to crude theft and underinvestment.