Diaspora Investment

Nigeria to reward every diaspora dollar inflow with N5

by with No Comment financeNews

Nigeria will reward every diaspora dollar inflow with five Naira additional payment as the country seeks to maximise foreign exchange flows from its citizens abroad.

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According to a statement by the central bank, recipients of diaspora flows who use formal channels to get U.S. dollars from abroad, will be paid N5 fir every dollar received and this will be on top of proceeds of the cash sent.

It is the latest move by authorities to increase the flow of remittances amid a shortage of hard currency.

Recipients will get 5 naira for every $1 they remit through licensed international money transfer operators and commercial banks, the central bank said.

The program will run from March 8 till May 8.

The West African nation’s currency has been devalued twice since March last year after a sharp drop in oil sales and remittances from workers abroad led to a shortage of dollars.

Measures by the central bank to bolster inflows and a rebound in oil prices could reduce pressure on the currency, which last traded at 411 per dollar at the exchange platform for investors and exporters known as Nafex.

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Diaspora Investment

What Nigeria must do for more diaspora investment

by with No Comment Uncategorized

More than two years after Somadina Iruegbu, a Nigerian UK-based businessman in diaspora, acquired a large plot of land in one of the most sort-after axis of Lekki, Lagos State, intending to develop it for commercial purposes, he has been unsuccessful in getting a land title.

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Even after asking his lawyer to take over the land registration from his brother who was stuck in the process, a year into it, Iruegbu said he was tired of the different payments his lawyer was requesting to ‘settle’ some officials at the land registration office, to help fasten the process.

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“I am regretting the investment, if I had invested that money in the UK or even any other country, it would have at least yielded some kind of return by now,” Iruegbu lamented in a WhatsApp call with BusinessDay.

Like Iruegbu, a lot of diaspora Nigerians have had a fair share of the harsh business environment. Possibly, Iruegbu’s experience might even discourage others.

The bottlenecks associated with getting a land title is not peculiar to Nigerians in the diaspora or those with plans to develop lands for commercial use, it also affect a lot of the country’s residents who either do not know people in high offices or lack the funds to ‘settle’ their way out of the normal but long registration process.

Data by PwC show that about 97 percent of lands in Lagos are unregistered. This, according to analysts, makes it difficult for banks to validate claims to land or for land occupants to use their land to create wealth or to start a business.

While Nigerian’s in diaspora moved 15 places to 131 in World Bank Doing Business ranking for 2020, it ranked 149 on the ease of obtaining Construction Permit and requires 17 procedures, 118 days, and 27.5 percent of property value, a factor PwC says would encourage more informal construction of properties and increase risks in the real estate sector.

“Whatever has been done has still not solved the problem of titling, forget the e-certificate. The people that will provide the e-certificate can be bottlenecks in the process,” Jide Ogunleye, CEO of Denaro Properties Limited, says, adding that officials won’t move land document file except they are paid.

The bureaucratic corruption, bribery, embezzlement and extortion in the different levels of government is not peculiar to the land titling office, it is the same for many government establishments.

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