Foreign Investments To Decline By 50% In 2021, Worst In 20 Years — NIPC

Global Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) has been projected to drop by 40 per cent this year and 50 per cent in 2021, being the worst in the last 20 years.

The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), Yewande Sadiku, told journalists in Abuja yesterday that global FDI is expected to plummet from $1.54 trillion recorded in 2019 to $924 billion in 2020 and further slump to $831.6 billion in 2021.

Ms Sadiku said the downturn in the global FDI flow, occasioned by COVID-19, is not expected to record recovery earlier than 2022.

The NIPC boss said Nigeria would need to formulate and implement “bold and coherent policy changes and deep economic reforms” to reverse the expected declines in FDI between 2020 and 2022.

“Investment interest in Nigeria was under pressure before COVID-19; coherent investment-supporting policies are urgently required to reverse the trend,” she said.

The investment promotion expert said NIPC tracked $41.71bn investment announcements in 2017, $73.07bn in 2018, $24.44bn in 2019 and $9.01bn in has been tracked so far in 2020.

She said not all the investment announcements materialised into actual investments.

“A more proactive all-of-government approach to investor support, across federal and state governments is required to convert more announcements to actual investments,” she said.