5 Worst Things For Foreign Investors In Lagos

5 Worst Things For Foreign Investors In Lagos

There are many things that only businessmen in Lagos face with and those things tend to scare away foreign investors.

1. There’s nothing less stable than power supply in Nigeria. And this affects not only Lagos but the whole of Nigeria as well.

That’s why your most required employee in the office will be electric power generator; otherwise you might end up waiting for restoring the electricity supply up to 12 hours.

From the other side generator has to be run up to 12 hours on a daily basis. Self-generated power can become quite costly considering fuel scarcity in Nigeria which keeps the petrol prices high, yet the businesses have to pay hefty electricity bills.

2. Constant traffic jams are another very unpleasant thing about Lagos inhabited with more than 20 million people.

You can easily spend a lot of your precious working time stuck in traffic.

And sometimes even all your fuel can run out in those endless traffic jams.

3. If that was not enough, the people doing business in Lagos should prepare to have to wait further for hours in the waiting room for their partners, clients or government officials.

Sometimes they may have stuck in some other traffic jam too, or maybe they are just not in a hurry.

4. The level of corruption is also very high so the businessmen operating in Lagos should prepare to pay hefty amount of government levies, taxes on everything and all the other hidden payments that sometimes mean pure bribery.

Bourbon, French transnational company, even held a special employee to give bribes in cash to facilitate doing business with Nigerian officials until this scandalous fact gained publicity.

5. The last but not the least thing that turns away foreign investors is the unpredictable policy of Central Bank of Nigeria creating problems for those who require working capital in foreign currency.

Besides that very odd factor like Hajj can influence currency exchange rate considerably and that creates additional risks for those doing business.Earlier JP Morgan threatened to exclude Nigeria from its Government Bond Index (GBI-EM) by the end of the year unless the central bank removes its tight measures preventing the outflow of foreign currency from foreign exchange market and thus keeping naira’s rate afloat.