Is Nigeria Really Ready to Attract Foreign Investments?

Since President Tinubu took over the reins of government of the Nigerian State on 29 May, 2023, there has been at least three major ventures unto foreign lands across many seas – remarkably, Indian, Germany, Saudi Arabia – to seek foreign investments.
The message of the President has been that Nigeria is ready for business with great efforts at hitting all the right notes. The problem with all such efforts is that they achieve the exact opposite when what these investors see are different from what the President wants them to be. They will simply see the President as an unserious and the country, unprepared for business. 
Leaving aside our difficult  problems of endemic corruption (or perception of corruption) and insecurity (or maybe perception of insecurity) for a moment, the Centre for Community Law decided to take a quick look at what ordinarily is a low hanging fruit, which happens to be the first point of contact with countries, businesses and even individuals in modern times, just to ascertain how prepared, really, the President and his team are, and indeed Nigeria is, for business. How prepared?
We made a quick tour of the State House website, only to find shocking and embarrassing revelations that would put off investors.  How would investors view a country where unelected individuals to whom the constitution of Nigerian assigned no constitutional roles are listed as as members of the Nigerian cabinet? That is what you find on the State House Website, which named the President’s wife and the Vice President’s wife alongside the President and his Vice under the “people” and “cabinet” tab, as officers of the Nigerian State. It cannot even be explained that an official website is now the most fitting place to advertise the spouses of elected office holders. This clear abuse of official powers or privileges is not what serious investors like to see.
Apart from that, the website is hardly functional and grossly out of date. The “presidential aides” tab is non-responsive, when you click on it. Just go to the “policy” tab, and click on the items there to see that they have not been updated since Tinubu came into office. One vivid example and indeed a big embarrassment is “Council and Committee”. Just click on it, and boom, Gen. Buhari is still our president; and the EMT is still chaired by Mr. Osinbajo. It is even obvious from the individuals on this page, that this has not been updated since 2015, yet billions of Naira is budgeted for the State House annually. The ‘economy’ tab follows suit. This is not to mention the dirty naira notes displayed on the site for the whole world to see.
What really is responsible for this? Is it laziness on the part of officials? We cannot but wonder what the overcrowded staff list of aides and junior aides, if you like, are doing with their time at the State House. Is being in the State House just for the luxuries or for service?  This State House website is very uninspiring and unimpressive for a brand that is marketing itself to a seeming unwilling buyers.
We were even more embarrassed to find a very unfortunate statement on the site, saying that “the new Whistleblowing Policy introduced by the Federal Ministry of Finance yielded, within its first two months of operation, yielded $160m and N8 billion in recoveries of stolen Government funds”. While it is easy to know that this is from the Buhari era (little wonder why Nigeria had zero FDI in 2022), it is difficult to understand why such a statement is yet on the site as at today. The State House should not take it upon itself to announce to the world that government officers are stealing government funds. Would genuine investors be impressed? We do not think so!
Perhaps, we missed it, but despite our best efforts, we were unable to see a website containing a full and authentic list of the President and his ministers – the constitutionally recognised cabinet – other than the unlawfully constituted four person cabinet on the State House website.
Maybe, Nigeria should take a cue from other countries like South Africa and India that have a comprehensive website on the officials of the State. The importance of this cannot be overemphasised, given the fact that people are now technologically wired to seek information from websites when contemplating whether to engage the entity.  
This is at all not the problem of the President, who cannot be blamed for the lapses. Matters of this nature are the exact reasons why the President has officials of the State who are paid to save the President and indeed the entire country from embarrassments by looking after the “little things” while the President is doing the hard work of convincing investors to invest in the country. May the lapses of the loads of advisers and aides parading the corridors of the State House not sabotage the President’s hard work!
We must give kudos to the Ministers who are on top of their game in this regard. Our random sample of the websites of ministries revealed that the websites have been updated since the Ministers took office. This is however, not enough to satisfy curious investors, who would also like to see that there are prompt responses to inquiries made through the website, especially those relating to freedom of information, which is the first test of transparency and open government.   It’s time to get it right as the regional power that Nigeria is!