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Foreign Investor, Associates to Pump in Multi-billion Dollars Investment into Nigeria

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The government should make things easier for the private sector and for the foreign investor, so that they can mobilize money into the country, build skyscrapers, help with the mining, help with the green energy sector, electrical cars, and most importantly, the airlines, low-cost airlines, for the good of the people to mobilize around the country. And obviously, last but not least, is the good quality home for everyone.

           — Allen Le Nam

 

EMmmuel Kehinde, Ilorin

Chairman, Allen Le & Partners, International Investment Consulting Joint Stock Company, Hanoi City, Vietnam, Mr. Allen Le Nam, has said that he will mobilise other foreign investors and their associates to invest multi-billion dollars in projects in Nigeria.

According to a statement on Tuesday by the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Silicon Valley Nigeria Economic Development (SV-NED) HRH, Queen Mother, Amb. Chief Amina Temitope Labinjo-Ajayi (JP), Nam spoke during his official visit to Nigeria.

This is as the federal government has expressed delight over Nam’s visit and commended Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Silicon Valley Nigeria Economic Development (SV-NED) HRH, Queen Mother, Amb. Chief Amina Temitope Labinjo-Ajayi (JP) over her dogged efforts to attracrr foreign investors to Nigeria. The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dr. Dele Alake, after a meeting with NAM and SV-NED management also said it was still not time to reveal details of their meeting but added that he was delighted over the visit.

Nam harped on the private sector as the corner stone for economic development of any country.

He expressed the hope that Nigeria will be one day like Canada and Vietnam. He also said Nigerians were friendly, adding that he was impressed by the reception he received at the airport and the behaviour of the people who he met.

Nam said: “The private sector would be looked at as a warrior of the country. The private sector should be looked as a warrior of the country. They’re the ones who are at the peacetime. They’re the ones who are fighting. They’re the ones who put their family back, put their time, put the risk, and then build the country.

“So, I hope that the government will look at the private sector, the businessman, the entrepreneur, as a warrior of the peacetime. Let’s build Nigeria together.

He said he was not expecting much from the government.

He said: “The government should make things easier for the private sector and for the foreign investor, so that they can mobilize money into the country, build skyscrapers, help with the mining, help with the green energy sector, electrical cars, and most importantly, the airlines, low-cost airlines, for the good of the people to mobilize around the country. And obviously, last but not least, is the good quality home for everyone.

He said: “This is my first time. But on how much I am planning to mobilise, I can tell you after, but it’s going to be multi-billion dollars around with my investor, my partners, and my associates.

“Hopefully, five years from now, the airport will be transformed. If you come to Vietnam right now, never mind next two years, you’ll see about five, six stars airport is being built. It’s going to be grand opening in the next two years in Hanoi. Hanoi is already done.”

Labinjo-Ajayi said the coming of Nam is a dream fulfilled. She stated that they are coming to invest in Nigeria under the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu.

She said: “There’s something I need to tell everybody. He may not be there. Our Almighty God may not be there when we need Him. But He will always be there on time. My case will be a case study for every mother and every Nigerian young adult. It’s never too late for God’s favor. Here, they are right now. This is the future.

“They are coming to invest heavily under the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu. My brother, Asiwaju Tinubu, is trying everything within his best. And he’s now concentrating on private sector. I belong to the private sector. We can’t rely only on the government. We have to get the private sector to bring us up.

“It takes a village to raise a child. That is where we are. As a mother, today is the happiest day of my life.

She added: “. To sum it up, let’s give credit to the president. Our president, Bernard Mitter.

He really encouraged me. And as a woman, he told me, he said, as a woman, go and make me proud. And that is why we are Renew Hope Agenda.

I think Nigeria can see the silver lining now. Because we’ve been going through a lot of dark tunnel. I love Nigeria.

I love our president. I love our young adults. This is Renew Hope Agenda for real.

As a last but not least, as a friendly reminder to all the entrepreneurs in Nigeria, that the government and everyone should treat them as warriors and heroes at the peacetime. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Kingsley Onyocho. And I am the Chief Executive Officer, Allen Lee and Partners. Mr. Kingsley Bede Onyeocha, said the delegation came to support growth in Nigeria.

He noted that there are great potential, huge human and mineral resources in the country.

Onyeocha said: “Everything is pretty good so far. So from the airport, what have you seen, how are the reception of the people? It’s amazing, right from arrival, right from we visited them. A lot of changes actually from the last time I was here.

So there’s a lot of changes here. How, positive or negative? Positively, to be very honest. I was told now there is a rail that makes for the shuttle to town.

I’ve never seen that here before. But other than that, everything is pretty good. We’ve met amazing people. And we are glad we are here. I’m here with my partner, Mr. Allen. And this is Mama D. So, she’s the one who surveys the land for us.

All we are here to see how we can be part of the development here. So that’s just basically what we came for. I know Nigeria is a good place. Hospitable, hardworking people. We just want Nigeria to grow. We are proud to be part of developments that is upcoming in different sectors. So we’ve made a lot of inquiries. We’ve contacted different sectors as well.

“But that is what we are here for. So, this is our first point of arrival. And we’ll take it from here. Nigeria is not lacking manpower. Nigeria is not lacking human resources. All we need is direction. So, we have human capacity. We just need direction.

“So, basically, we’ve seen a lot of properties that can be developed. We’ve seen things that can take place here. That is why we are here in terms of support. The infrastructure that already exists. And we want to help build it. So, as it is, it’s just to invest. So, we know the human capital is here. That’s just what it is.”

   

About author
Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

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  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
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