UK finance firm to invest $1bn in Nigeria in post Brexit drive

The CDC Group, United Kingdom’s development finance arm, is planning to invest more than $1 billion in Nigeria after leaving the European Union in March, 2019.

The group already has about $400 million investment in the country for 70 years. It injects money into companies directly as equity or debt, or through private-equity funds.

A Bloomberg report, said CDC has investments ranging from listed Nigerian banks to an Ethiopian wine maker and a bakery in Zimbabwe.

The group aims to put as much as $4.5bn into the continent in that time, which would almost triple its existing African portfolio of roughly $2.6bn.

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“A reasonable figure for Nigeria, given the size of its economy, would be about $1.2bn,” the Chief Executive Officer, CDC, Nicholas O’Donohoe, was quoted as saying in an interview in Lagos.

CDC will also open offices in Lagos and Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, adding to the one it has in Johannesburg. The Nigerian office will open early next year and have around 10 people, according to O’Donohoe.

The group, this year, gave a loan of $100m to the Nigerian unit of Indorama Corporation, which is building a fertiliser factory in the south of the country. It also committed $25m to Synergy, a local private-equity firm focused on small businesses in West Africa.

It will be recalled that the UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, visited South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya earlier this year, expecting her desire for the country to become the G7’s biggest investor on the continent by 2022.

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