The Chief Executive Officer of Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote, has called on governors in Northern Nigeria to do more in mobilizing local private sector investors in their states.
Dangote made the call at the Kaduna Economic and investment summit on Wednesday, where he stated that such a move can spur huge inflow of private capital, reduce insecurity, unemployment, and poverty.
“Northern Nigeria will continue to fall behind if the respective state government does not move to close the development gap. Closing these gaps requires huge multi-year investment and government will not be able to raise the capital required to fund this. Only the private sector can raise the capital required to fund the level of investment this country needs.
“Efforts should be more in terms of attracting local investors, there is no foreigner that will come and invest without seeing the local investors invest. So local investors are key to attracting foreign investments and we must pay attention to that.”
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According to the business mogul, the partnership to establish an automobile assembly plant between the Dangote group, Peugeot and the Kaduna State government would help grow the domestic automobile industry and SMEs will benefit from the supply chain.
“On our own part, we have already progressed to establish billions of naira automobile assembly plant in conjunction with Peugeot of France and the Kaduna State Government.
“It is in the hope that the state government will also incentivize the SMEs to take advantage of opportunities inherent in the supply chain. This is the only way we can grow and develop our domestic automobile industry and economy in general.
“Government must create a conducive environment that will trigger a huge inflow of private capital into attractive sectors of the economy. Private investments will create jobs and will ameliorate the twin challenges of unemployment and poverty,” he added.
Dangote tasked state governments to work hard by creating the necessary legal and regulatory framework, offer attractive sector-wide incentives, identify the sectors of the economy where their state has a comparative advantage and provide information and data to enable prospective investors to evaluate the opportunities in these sectors.
