Wale Ẹdun, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy has disclosed what he feels serves as the reason for international companies fleeing the country.
However, he said, the government is working on the economic and investment climate to attract more multinationals into Nigeria.
He was a guest on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme.
“One of the major drawbacks one of the major impediments for them (exiting multinationals) was they did not have a liquid foreign exchange market,” he said.
“Now, we have a willing buyer, willing seller foreign exchange market. It is elevated, may be not at the levels we will like it to be but it is when you get inflation down that you can stabilise the exchange rate and even get it coming down similarly with the interest rate. That fight is on. It is an improved environment for them, for big investors as a whole.”
He credited President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for improving the investment climate for gas which abounds in Nigeria with his recent executive orders.
“Companies will always come and go, of course, our aim is to not only keep them but to have them even more coming to invest, and we are sure that with the environment that we put in place, they would come.”
In the last one year, US-based Procter and Gamble (P&G), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Unilever, Sanofi-Aventi Nigeria and some other companies have left the shores of Nigeria, citing high energy cost and currency depreciation as their reasons.
The latest to make its intention known is Kimberly-Clark, manufacturers of Huggies and Kotex brands of diapers. The brand is halting production in the country.
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