Lagos ready to leverage high impact investments to create prosperity for citizens –Sanwo-Olu

•Government’ll explore use of local currency for new projects financing

From Amaechi Ogbonna, Marrakesh

Lagos state Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has said his administration is committed to leveraging oppourtunities created by the ongoing Africa Investment Forum interface with investors from across the world to create projects that impact lives of the citizens.

Sanwo-Olu, who spoke on the sidelines of the ongoing Africa Investment Forum in Marrakesh, Morocco, with the theme “Unlocking Africa’s Value Chain” said he was at the Forum for exchange of ideas with the global business community to identify areas of mutual economic relationship to enable his government initiate policies to help ramp up projects in transportation, food processing and film industries among others to change lives of the people.

Sanwo-Olu noted that given the benefit of having about 23 years of consistent and unbroken public policy environment, concerns around the issue of political risk that many people are often cite shouldn’t really arise among investors coming into Lagos state.

“We cannot be talking of political risk when Lagos has been together over the last 23 years. There is no political risks. All our focus is on infrastructure projects that impact the lives our people,” he said.

The Governor said the strategy around what the government is doing is for all of the investments to be domiciled in local currency, so as to get out of the foreign currency risks.

“It’ll deepen our own local currency market and help us de-risk foreign currency interest rates. Whether it is a billion dollars in local currency or trillion naira. That is the kind of thing that we are going to pick on,” he said.

You spoke about the need to sweat out our public assets more in order to generate revenue and cash. You know, Lagos state will lead the way when we are talking about Nigeria, I know that the Federal Government has a similar plan especially with the Ministry of Finance Incorporated, (MOFI) to list out some of these public assets that have been under-utilised in the market?