By Aliyu DANLADI
A Human Rights lawyer and political analyst, Mr. Wale Ogunade, has said the nation’s population and its resilient economy have been attracting visits from world leaders.
Ogunade made the remark on Thursday in Lagos.
It would be recalled that in July, Nigeria hosted French President Emmanuel Macron, while on Wednesday, British Prime Minister, Theresa May visited and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel will be visiting on Friday.
“All these world leaders coming into Nigeria show that the world is interested in Nigeria and its economy.
“And you should be sure that 180 million people is not a joke. They are not a people that can be sidelined or ignored. It’s a big market and anybody, any wise entrepreneur, any government or investor will want to patronise such a market.
“Even with all the challenges we are facing as a nation, our people, our economy remains resilient.
“The economies of some other countries have collapsed. For instance, Venezuela, which was almost at the same level of development with Nigeria, and both of them are oil exporting nations, but while Venezuela is going down, Nigeria is moving up and forging on.
“Of course, any country will want to continue to collaborate and do business with Nigeria,’’ he said.
Ogunade said world leaders were visiting to expand their business frontiers. “For a country like the UK, the brexit issue is there; for Germany, they too are going through some challenges and of course France too needs to expand it’s frontier. So, the place to be will be Africa generally and Nigeria in particular,’’ he said.
Ogunade urged the Federal and State Governments to create the enabling environment by relaxing some laws, upgrade infrastructure and boost security in the country.
“As a country, we need to take advantage of this new found love to make business activities in Nigeria easy.
“Government should look into these three key areas: infrastructure, security and relax the laws so that investors can easily repatriate their funds.
“Our government should start creating the sites and services for factories, set up industrial zones, import and export processing zones. Definitely more investors will be encouraged to come to patronise Nigeria better,’’ Ogunade said.
