NIPC says foreign investment in Nigeria drops to $9.01bn in 2020

The Executive Secretary Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission  Yewande Sadiku has said that due to the Corona Virus pandemic, there is tightening margins for foreign investment in Nigeria while there was automatic effect on reinvested earnings, a key component of FDI. She said that the Commission tracked $41.71billion foreign investment in 2017 which rose to $73.07 billion in 2018 and declined to $24.44 billion in 2019 and further to $9.01 billion in 2020.

She said that Nigeria requires a coherent policy reforms to reverse the decline in Foreign Direct Investments flow expected in the 2021 fiscal year. Sadiku said this at a 2020 journalists Retreat held  in Abuja. Sadiku said due to the Coronavirus pandemic, a decline of between 40 to 50 per cent is expected in 2020/2021, adding that this is the lowest level in almost 20 years.

In a presentation entitled “Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 on Investment in Nigeria’’ Sadiku highlighted the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global economic growth and FDI. She said globally, FDI had been falling since 2015 while in Nigeria FDI flow has been under pressure before COVID-19. She said that the impact was expected to be worse than the global financial crises due to the negative effect of the Coronavirus pandemic. She said that FDI was stagnated during the COVID-19 lockdown because there was shutdown on implementation of ongoing projects due to closures of sites.