The Managing Director, Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), Mr Uche Orji, says Nigeria has the challenge of getting pension funds and insurance companies to participate in infrastructure investment and development.
Orji said this on Friday, while briefing newsmen on the activities of NSIA at the ongoing annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC.
He said that the establishment of Nigerian Credit Enhance Facility by the Federal Government was therefore to help pension funds and insurance companies to participate in infrastructure development.
“The idea of this is to provide a facility for some kind of enhancement to make it easy for pension funds and insurance companies to participate in infrastructure.
“One of the issues that have dominated discussion on the NSIA at this World Bank event is the effort at establishment of the Nigerian Credit Enhancement Facility.
“This credit enhancement facility is a very important initiative of the NSIA and we started working on it late last year.
“Hopefully before the end of this year, we will start to work on implementing it.
“This is the conversation that we had yesterday and we also discussed with the U.S. EXIM in the panel and we discussed in various areas.’’
“This makes it easy for insurance companies to participate. If you are an insurance company, we can insure a level of your investment.’’
Orji said that NSIA would also solve infrastructure problems that were purely commercial in nature with strong partnership with the National Planning Commission.
Commenting on the level of portfolio investment in the year, he said that in the second quarter, there were good investments, but in the third quarter it was more challenging.
He said that the fund had not witnessed new contributions but N1.5 billion profits was made in the first quarter and slightly above that in second quarter.
“The final numbers will be released next week but it is just about N100 million higher for the first and second quarter.
“For the third quarter that has just ended, we will produce those numbers after the auditing,’’ he said.
On participation of the agency on the National Infrastructure Master Plan, he said that NSIA was part of the discussion and would key into so many areas.
“We are keying into so many levels, there are about 18 sectors in infrastructure that are investable by third party investors.
Orji said that NSIA had chosen to invest in six sectors including agriculture for small holder farmers.
He said that others would be in the health care sector, adding that in few mouths, NSIA investment on the sector would be made public, especially on advanced medicine.
“ I told you that we will be investing on gas processing plants, we did that and we are working on two others.
“We are also looking at motor ways and we believe that it is a very profitable avenue for investment, people are complaining about the second Niger bridge but we believe it is a very profitable project,’’ he said.
(NAN)
