Aisha Rimi’s appointment by the Presidency as Executive Secretary/CEO of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) was announced on October 13, 2023. She was charged with advancing the nation’s economic development through strategic investment promotion.
A leading transaction lawyer with decades of expertise in foreign investment and business advisory across Africa, Ms Rimi has significant experience working with development finance institutions (DFIs) on multi-million-dollar investments in infrastructure projects. Since assuming office, she has led a sweeping institutional repositioning of NIPC—anchored on transparency, investor responsiveness, and strategic partnerships. A cornerstone of this reform effort is a recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI), which establishes a joint National Investment & Asset Registry, creates a pipeline of bankable federal projects, and mandates NIPC to co-lead global roadshows to mobilise blended finance for priority sectors.
“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. Nigeria has everything, but we are not where we’re supposed to be.”
In this exclusive interview with BusinessDay’s General Manager, Bashir Ibrahim Hassan, Ms Rimi – who holds a master’s degree in law and a postgraduate diploma in organisational leadership from Oxford University – dissects these reforms, the challenges of shepherding Nigeria’s primary investment gateway, and her blueprint for driving inclusive growth across the economy.
What did you bring to the table in taking this position?
My greatest accomplishment was growing an indigenous Nigerian law practice that evolved into a pan-African firm. When we started the firm, we were clearly ahead of our time.
We anticipated that with increasing globalisation and the growth of the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement and the movement of goods, services and people, it would be very important to have a practice that could cut across all different legal barriers. And so we successfully grew the firm and expanded into several African countries, and it’s growing organically. It is still growing, and we go where the clients need us. I think that has probably been my greatest achievement to date in the legal profession.
One of the greatest challenges I think that I had as a young lawyer was the court atmosphere, which at the time was male-dominated and intimidating for a young female lawyer. It actually turned me off from being a litigator and an advocate. The judges were quite intimidating. I think I should have stuck it out a bit longer, and I probably gave up a little too early.
Who was your mentor?
I have had several, but I was very lucky to have been employed in a firm called Ajumogobia and Okeke. The two named partners were very instrumental in shaping me into the lawyer that I eventually became. Over the years, I’ve had several other mentors, depending on where I found myself – political mentors, personal mentors, professional mentors, etc.
But I have come to realise that there’s always something to learn from everyone – it could be your colleagues or the security man.
When you look at its mandate, NIPC is huge. As a thoroughbred professional, what is your assessment of the challenges and the system you met?
As you know, although NIPC was established in 1995, the commission did not start full operations until 1999 with Engineer Mustafa Bello at the helm of a core staff drawn from different establishments who had to be put through intensive training. Investment promotion is not something that you learn in university. But I think he laid a very solid foundation in terms of the organisational structure and the pioneer staff. So I am grateful to him and those that have led the Commission since then.
However, some systems and processes are now outdated. And I don’t think that the organisation kept up as quickly and as rapidly as it should have done. Times have changed, and things have moved very rapidly.
Since 2023, what vision has been driving you, and what plans do you have in place to achieve it?
When I collapsed my own practice into this bigger law practice that has now grown into this pan-African law firm, we were driven by a vision to become the leading law firm across the continent.
I’ve transplanted a similar vision and the methods that I used in building the law firm into this commission. First of all, you have to start with your people. If your people are not happy, if they are not properly remunerated and trained, they cannot deliver your vision. For example, if I am an architect and I put up fancy designs and drawings but I don’t have the right builders or welders, that vision is only as good as the paper it is drawn on.
So, human capacity development, training, and welfare are very important. I realised that people here have institutional memory and capacity but not the opportunity to deliver. So, we need 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. Nigeria has everything, but we are not where we’re supposed to be.
So we will see that you are taking this institution from here to here. Can you describe how you intend to elevate NIPC from its current state to the vision you’ve outlined?
You know, thankfully, this administration has a clear agenda of what it is 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. 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.
There is no reason why Nigeria cannot feed itself. We can even export across the world.
We need to increase our electricity capacity, of course, focus on renewables and look at alternative power sources.
In all these, we have to rebuild trust. And rebuilding the trust is not just internally, in terms of our own people here and our own staff. We are working to strengthen collaboration with other MDAs to ensure seamless, whole-of-government support for investment promotion and with sub-national investment promotion agencies.
Rebuilding the trust will enable us to work together towards rebuilding this country. Investment promotion is a whole-of-government business.
So what targets did you set for yourself in terms of bringing in FDI and also boosting more domestic investments in the country and also retaining them?
One of the things that we do here is administer what is known as the pioneer status incentive, whose motive some misinterpret as unfairly giving tax waivers to certain investors. But it’s an incentive that is supposed to encourage investors, because when you come and you set up, in most cases, you’re doing some heavy lifting. So the government has industries designated as “pioneer status industries” that are given tax waivers for an 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. Last year alone, at least about 5,000 new jobs were created. We monitor the situation very closely, because even when they come up for renewal, we have to monitor and see whether they have applied those savings like they should, like they’re expected to.
So they are expanding their plants and employing more people. And then, of course, those people are paying taxes.
How do you balance the task of attracting new FDIs and growing the domestic investments? And which are you more interested in?
I’m interested in growing the Nigerian economy, and I’m interested in responsible, credible, sustainable, and inclusive investments.
And, you know, there’s this thing about charity beginning at home. So if we don’t support our own domestic investors, like I said, it’s very hard for outsiders to take us seriously. So we’re focused on both.
But one of the very interesting things that I noticed is that when we started going out and trying to engage local companies to see what challenges they have or opportunities, or even trying to matchmake them with the foreign investors that we come across who sometimes will ask us about opportunities and industries they can partner with, there was a lot of suspicion and resistance because of distrust of the government.
So it has taken a while to be able to convince them that we are actually here to offer a service; we want to know what you’re doing and see how we can help.
If I go to an investment forum and somebody says to me, “I’m looking to partner with somebody in rice milling, I’m not just going to look at a piece of paper or something from Google and say, Oh, yes, there’s a rice milling plant here. I want to see it. I want to know that you’re doing what you’re doing.” Sometimes there are even opportunities from DFIs who want to support. After the initial pushback, slowly, they started saying, “OK, well, how much is this going to cost us?” But, nothing, this is a free service. We are the government and are here to support you. We are here to encourage you. We are here to help you grow.
How much investment have you been able to help the country attract so far? How has it boosted domestic investment? And what is your target in the next few months?
I would like to give you those figures, but I’m also cautious. So what I can do for you is that I will come back to you with exact figures. Because, again, a lot of the things that we do need to be verified.
We are working with CBN and the National Bureau of Statistics to get data, which is something that is very important and should not be misquoted. I will revert with verified data from our Pioneer Status team, the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the National Bureau of Statistics.
What are the 3 biggest priorities for NIPC and the Nigerian investment sector? What are you bringing in, and what are you doing?
I’ve talked about my staff because, like I said, I cannot run this race alone. I need the support of the staff, so I want to build the capacity of my staff; I want to improve their welfare; I want to train them.
I also want to rebuild the trust that we have and the collaboration amongst the different MDAs. I want to strengthen our relationship with state investment promotion agencies because, of course, when investors’ investments come in, they’re not going to sit in Abuja; they’re going to go out to the states. So we are working very actively with the state investment promotion agencies to strengthen the ones that need strengthening, to build this collaboration, this synergy whereby we are able to direct investments to certain areas based on their competitive and their comparative advantages.
We have actually designed a programme that helps them to replicate what we are doing here at headquarters. So I also want to, because again the world has gone digital, I want to automate more of our processes to digitise some of our processes. We already have some, but they’re still at quite basic stages. I think it’s very important that we do that. And then just as importantly, just to close this question out, is to rebuild the trust in Nigeria to be able to receive investors, whether they are domestic or foreign, to be able to subscribe to this Nigeria-first policy.
When you think of Africa, I want you to think of Nigeria first. We have the advantage of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area agreement now, which means that when you look at Nigeria, you can’t look at 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 AfCFTA office run by Mr Awolowo which is doing great work, but I think that, like everything, there’s a gestation period.
It’s still new terrain, but by and large, what it does is it’s the largest free trade agreement in the world today. Like I said, it opens up the market to 1.4 billion people, and I think once rules of origin are adhered to and subscribed to, Nigeria can definitely benefit from it because we are strategically positioned. Nigeria is the trigger for Africa; once you pull that trigger, the effects are going to be phenomenal.
Tell us more about the trade policy recently approved by the FEC and how it impacts the work you do.
We have a banner upstairs that says, ‘Think investment: NIPC first, Nigeria first’ – a message we continue to champion.
So when people come to me – I listen to everybody, but when I hear that the areas of interest are more like trade or “cash and carry”, I still give them the information that they need… But, for me, it has always been about how we grow this economy, and everything in this Nigeria First policy aligns with exactly what we have been trying to do at NIPC.
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 should not work. I mean, we as an agency do not necessarily do any procurements as such, but certainly what we do is with investors, and we have always encouraged them to think locally; backward integration is very important.
So even when they set up, we say, Okay, but you know that in another year or so we expect you to do XYZ, which is growing the local value chain. We’re promoting an inclusive business policy because, again, there are small and medium enterprises that are often left out of this equation, but, you know, they can grow with the right support, and they can be scaled up to be able to be feeders into some of these larger industries. So we are actively promoting this Nigeria-first policy.
What is NIPC doing differently now compared to what was happening in the past?
I am learning from what has happened in the past. I am learning from those experiences and those mistakes, and I am trying not to repeat them. I am building on the positive experiences of the past, striving to be more inclusive – inclusive not just within the Commission (NIPC) but also, like I said, with other MDAs – and making NIPC much more visible than in the past boom-and-bust era.
NIPC is back up to life.
