Labour Party Presidential Candidate, Peter Obi, has termed it a waste of time efforts of the Federal Government in seeking foreign investors abroad.
He said if an enabling environment for businesses to thrive is not put in place, it will yield no fruit.
President Bola Tinubu at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, United States, had told American entrepreneurs to feel free and safe to invest in Nigeria.
Tinubu at the Nigeria-U.S. Executive Business Round table, listed measures he said he had taken to boost confidence of the global investment community in Nigeria, including forming the fiscal, monetary and tax policy environment.
Obi while speaking in Enugu said foreign investors were like bees and honey and a government that does not know where the country is going is wasting time going abroad to seek investors.
“I came back here and told someone that you don’t go looking for foreign investors. Anyone going around looking for foreign investors is wasting everyone’s time. Foreign investors are like bees and honey. If you put honey here, how the bees will converge, no one will tell you. After the G20 meeting, Emmanuel Macron, French president flew to Bangladesh because the country had just ordered 10 Airbus 350s, so he had to go and see them. If you look at all the economic analysis, go and look at where Bangladesh would be in 2030 and up to 2050. But no one knows where we are going to be”, he said.
“A deputy governor was asked why he didn’t go to school and he said it doesn’t matter. But he filled it. He was the one who said, ‘I went to this school’, no one forced you. If you know that schools don’t matter, you would have said, ‘I didn’t go to school’, so that we would imagine your ingenuity as someone who didn’t go to school and was able to get to that level.
“We are now in a country where people say one thing and do something else. I asked a woman to stand on the queue and she told me that whenever she stands in a queue, she doesn’t get anything. This happened to me last year. After the tribunal decided our case, I called the woman and apologised to her. We had someone going round the world and saying that the election would be the best. It was from INEC that I heard what is called ‘real time’. Suddenly, he says he can do the election anyhow. Why didn’t you tell us this before the election, so that when we are voting, we can also behave anyhow?” Obi queried.
