African SWFs as Strategic Capital ‘Anchors’ and Co-Investors
Welcome to the panel on African Sovereign Wealth Funds as Strategic Capital Anchors and Co-investors. My name is Uche Orji, I am the CEO of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA). NSIA was founded in 2012 with an objective of investing revenues derived from excess sale of crude oil to provide stabilization support, savings for future generations and also invest in and enhance infrastructure investments in Nigeria. What we have seen; I probably speak for the continent now, is that in the last 5 years we’ve seen significant growth in Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in Africa. I think we have gone from six years ago; about four or five SWFs in Africa to now about 14 or 15 at various stages of development. These have an aggregate capital between $150-200 billion.
The truth is many of them have different investment objectives, one of the things that has happened in the last two or three years is we have started to now talk about becoming the platform for co-investment in Africa and our various countries. More recently in Nigeria, the NSIA launched two Co-investment Funds with two co-anchors; ourselves and Old Mutual of South Africa. The first is a $200 million Nigeria Agriculture Investment Fund and the second is a $500 million Real Estate Investment Fund. With contributions from Old Mutual of $50 million and NSIA $50 million for the Real Estate Fund and then capital raises commencing to get us the remaining $500 million. This is the same with Agriculture where we launched with Old Mutual and UFF.
So the point here is that we have gone from talking about this to actually beginning to do it and the reality is that the way SWFs in Africa are set up, quite frankly I am personally very impressed. The level of accountability is very high, the level of governance is very high and I think all of those things make it convenient for these funds to become the co-investment partners of choice for the various countries.
Through the rest of today, we’ll be spending time talking about how we can actually make it more effective, make sure you as investors and collaborators know what we are doing in our various SWFs. But also, look at how to work on a much more pan-African platform. With that in mind I will probably start by introducing the first member of the panel. We are going to go around and everyone will introduce themselves but I will start by asking that Dr Wagacha first of all introduce himself and what they are doing in Kenya. Then we will go through to Amadou Hott from Senegal, Tarik Senhaji from Morocco and Jose dos Santos from Angola.
Watch the full video here
