With sound education from one of the world’s leading universities and intensive professional mentoring and accomplishments behind her, there were many who were taken aback when she left corporate legal practice for a political appointment. Her defiant response to this is, “Well, we can’t all be critics of government; we must all roll up our sleeves. Nigeria belongs to all of us. We must all do our best to be able to contribute our quota and to see how we can help to transform things.”
That’s the mindset that Aisha Rimi, who obtained a master’s degree in law and a postgraduate diploma in organisational leadership from prestigious Oxford University, brought to her appointment by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as CEO of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) on 13 October 2024.
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Her work at NIPC is a continuation from where she has brought over 30 years of experience in legal advisory, investment facilitation, and regulatory compliance. Before her appointment in October 2023, she served as Managing Partner at Africa Law Practice NG & Co, overseeing corporate governance, infrastructure, and cross-border transactions.
She says: “My greatest accomplishment was probably growing an indigenous Nigerian, nay African, law practice that has grown successfully now into a pan-African firm. When we started, I think we were ahead of our time. We anticipated that with globalization and certainly the Africa continental free trade area agreement and movement of good services and people that it would, it was going to be very important to have a practice that could cut across all different legal barriers. And so we’ve successfully grown our firm to be in several African countries and it’s organic. It’s still growing and we go where the clients need us. So I think that has probably been my greatest achievement to date in the legal profession.
It’s the same mindset that she’s using to address the challenges of leading the very important institution to drive Nigeria’s economic growth. It’s a mindset that was shaped by legends in the law profession, having worked with the firm of Ajamugobia and Okeke. She has become a leading transaction lawyer with expertise in foreign investment and business advisory for doing business in Africa, having garnered significant experience working with development finance institutions (DFIs) on multi-million-dollar investments in infrastructure projects.
Her experience has rubbed off on Nigeria’s drive to increase the pace of investment — she has since secured a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) and the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI).
At NIPC, she is leading initiatives to streamline investment processes, strengthen public-private partnerships, and drive sustainable growth. She’s not only building upon the legacies of people like Engineer Mustafa Bello, one of the pioneering CEOs of the corporation, but also coming up with initiatives that are compelled by new global trends.
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In terms of priority, she’s addressing human capacity development, training, and welfare, which are very important. “I realised that people here have institutional memory and capacity, but not yet the opportunity to deliver. So, we needed to train those who were not exposed to the same experiences as the older ones. There is absolutely no reason why the NIPC, being the investment promotion agency for the country, cannot be the leading investment promotion agency across the continent. Across the African continent, Nigeria has everything but we’re not where we’re supposed to be.”
“Under the scheme, the government has areas designated as “pioneer status industries” that are given tax waivers for the initial three years and then subsequently another two.”
She has very precise ideas about the solutions to investment challenges in Nigeria, including how to balance the task of attracting new FDIs and growing the domestic investments. And which are you interested in more? “ I’m interested in growing the Nigerian economy, and I’m interested in responsible, credible, sustainable, and inclusive investments. So in whatever shape or form they come in,” she insists. “And, you know, there’s this thing about charity beginning at home. If we don’t support our own people, like I said, it’s very hard for outsiders to take us seriously. So we’re focused on both.”
Rimi is determined to deliver massive foreign direct investment (FDI) through an innovative approach known as “Pioneer Status Incentive”. According to her, the motive for the initiative has been misinterpreted by some as an unfair attempt to give tax waivers to certain investors. But she says it’s actually an incentive to encourage genuine and serious behaviour.
Under the scheme, the government has areas designated as “pioneer status industries” that are given tax waivers for the initial three years and then subsequently another two. “Such tax breaks enable them to recoup some of their investments and then reinvest their savings into expanding their businesses,” she explains.
Last year alone, at least about 5,000 new jobs were created. These are closely monitored because, according to her, “We have to see whether they have applied those savings like they should, like they’re expected to. So they’re expanding their plants; they’re employing more people. And then, of course, those people are paying taxes.
Companies doing renewables, hospitality and tourism are among the most prospective beneficiaries. But they have to have been in operation for almost a year. “We have to see that they are in actual operation and that they have made the investments, which are checked against their capital importation,” Ms. Rimi says.
One of the very interesting things she has noticed when trying to engage companies to forge links between them and potential foreign partners is suspicion and resistance because of distrust of the government – they feel they are facing tax burdens. It takes a while to convince them that the government is actually offering them useful service and trying to find out how they’re doing.
Ms Rimi says Nigeria must maximise her potential in FDI, saying, “We have the advantage of the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement now, which means that when you look at Nigeria, you can’t look at it as 250 million people. You have to look at it as 1.4 billion. There’s absolutely no reason why large industrialists and manufacturers cannot take advantage of this and set up and use Nigeria as their hub to penetrate the rest of Africa. There’s a whole AFCFDA office run by Mr Awolowo which is doing great work, but I think that, like everything, there’s a gestation period. So it’s still very new and you know just naturally as a people we’re always a bit reluctant to sort of to share.”
She underscores the need for Nigeria’s leadership in African investment by saying, “So NIPC is a gateway to Nigeria; Nigeria is a gateway to Africa. It’s very simple, and for us, Nigeria presents all the opportunities, and there’s absolutely no reason why this Nigeria-first policy shouldn’t work. I mean, we as an agency don’t necessarily do any procurements as such, but certainly what we do is with all our investors, and we have always encouraged them to think locally; backward integration is very important.”
She stresses how the present administration has a clear agenda of what it’s trying to achieve with the Renewed Hope agenda. “So, we are reconfiguring ourselves to tie into that agenda, because everything that the administration is doing is exactly what we want to be doing. So we, like I said, we have recalibrated. We need to diversify the economy. We cannot continue relying on oil; we need to build human capacity, we need to generate employment, we need to industrialise, and we need to feed ourselves.”
Ms Rimi is also confronting the syndrome of government agencies not synergising efforts due to lack of trust but instead working in their different silos. So, in exploring investment opportunities, she says: “We have to rebuild the trust. And rebuilding the trust is not just internally, in terms of our own people here and our own staff.
“We need to rebuild trust with other MDAs because the institution has suffered some kind of neglect from them for a variety of reasons. Building trust with other MDAs will enable us to work together towards rebuilding this country. Investment promotion is a whole-of-government business,” she posits.
Bashir Ibrahim Hassan is General Manager, Abuja & Northern Nigeria, BusinessDay
