INVESTMENT IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP : Investment Mobilization as a Solution to Capital Raising and Industrial Capacity.

by Dr Nicky Okoye

Nov 06, 2017

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Raising Capital can be daunting task if the odds are stacked against you. And in Nigeria the odds are surely stacked against you. As a Nation we are set up to fail. We set up to get everything wrong. Our public servants do not understand their roles in developing entrepreneurs; our laws can sometimes be limiting and anti-productive.  And so we must celebrate the few Nigerian Entrepreneurs that have achieved wonders in the last few years by building monumental empires which can stand the test of time. We must however go further to support the funding of new projects and new start-ups so that entrepreneurs will not be afraid to fail. This can be done by investment pooling once again, getting interested investors together both locally and internationally and getting them to pool their investable funds in projects and Start-up businesses promoted by our brightest and our best young minds. Taking a Start-up idea from inception to implementation is not rocket science. You first need the entrepreneur who is the thinker and the driver. Then you will need competent managers, and a management team. In Most cases the entrepreneur will not be a great day to day manager of the start-up or project as he or she is better suited at driving the idea and getting investors together rather than at day to day business management. Then next we need capital to fund and support the innovative ideas, the managers and the entrepreneur. Once we have all these in place our Nation and our region can take off.

To mobilize Investment we must work together, I believe strongly that our investment mobilization strategy must be locally based. There is too much emphasis on foreign investment, but if the truth be told the foreign investors only invest in strong local entrepreneurs and local projects that have strong local support. So the strategy being used by most of our Governments, both State and Federal, to attract investors from the Western World has been fundamentally flawed.  The Strategy must change and it must be built on the back of our local entrepreneurs, in that way foreign investors are much more comfortable that our people are risking their capital in Nigeria and in the region in the projects that we are seeking foreigners to participate.