[2007-06-15]  Support local investors’
THE African Continent will continue lagging behind in development as long as local investors are not given the recognition they deserve, Investment Climate Facility (ICF) chief executive, Omari Issa, has said.
Professor Issa said this in Cape Town, South Africa when he presented a paper on ‘Key Challenges in Improving Investment Climate’ during the one-day media workshop attended by business editors from 11 African countries.
He observed that despite efforts to put things right, African growth was static because of the perception by many African governments that foreign investors were better than the local ones.
“This preferential treatment of foreign investors, even if their track records were not known, had frustrated the local investors some of whom had been thrown out of business,” he said.
The ICF chief executive said it was unfortunate that African government officials spent colossal sums of money across the globe in search of foreign investors to attract yet there were some local investors, business entities and business individuals who could perform wonders given the necessary support and a conducive environment in which they operated from.
“Existing investors in Africa are not being recognised. What is more worrying is the fact that African government officials are busy travelling the globe to hold conferences so that they can attract foreign investors at the expense of local ones.
“They don’t realise that they are spending a lot of money on these trips and conferences,” Prof Issa said amid murmurs of approval from the audience.
He gave an example of multinationals like SABMILLER and Coca Cola that had invested heavily in Africa by creating more than 6,000 jobs on the continent.
Instead of ignoring such multinationals, Prof Issa said there was need to change the stance and engage the multinationals in discussions to know what problems they were facing.
“Our priorities must be put right. We need to talk to these local investors so that we know the problems they are encountering and help them to do business in a conducive environment,” he said.
However, Prof Issa admitted that it was hard to invest in Africa because of myriad challenges that the continent was faced with.
He was of the view that lack of infrastructure, poor records of governance, rampant corruption, plunder of public resources, lack of electricity supply, bad investment as well as migration laws were some of the problems that hampered investment in Africa.
Prof Issa noted that the African continent would not be on track to meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) so long as the investment impediments were not removed on the continent.
More than 40 senior business editors from Africa had converged at the media workshop that was held in the resort city of Cape Town, South Africa.
A day-long workshop was being sponsored by the brewing giants, SABMILLER and Coca-Cola Africa.
It mainly focused on stimulating greater media debate around the key economic and developing challenges in African countries including local business and investment climate.
Other topics that were covered are: The role of the media in development, Business and Economic reporting, Investment and development, and making Africa a better place to do business.
Among the seminar facilitators were SAB-UNESCO chair of Media and Democracy and acting Head of School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, Prof Fackson Banda.

Source: TIMES OF ZAMBIA