The National Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) has revealed plans to raise and over $200 million that would be invested in Nigeria’s health sector.
The Managing Director (MD) of the Authority, Uche Orji, disclosed this during the weekly ministerial briefing organised by the Presidential Media Team at the presidential villa, Abuja.
He said the investment was intended to inject major investments in pharmaceutical infrastructure, including the manufacture of essential drugs, vaccines and the construction of cancer centres in the nation’s healthcare sector.
He explained that the investment plan would be made to break the nation’s huge dependence on foreign logistics.
According to him, the money would be raised in collaboration with some interested investors.
Orji said: “NSIA, we can sponsor, we can co-develop and we can just invest. We are looking at all three options; the more difficult ones, we will do ourselves and the easier ones we will look at some companies that already have existing infrastructure and work with them.
“Some of these infrastructures are just so archaic and so far behind and it is better to just build them brand new, as we did with the cancer centre in Lagos University Teaching Hospital, we just demolished it and started afresh. So these are all things we need to do but we have established the fact that it is important, we will do that and I am certain we will complete something in healthcare this year.
“We are trying to raise a $200 million fund; not just us, there are other investors that have indicate interest so the documentation for getting the third party funds is ongoing.”
The MD further said the NSIA has been able to do three major things in the health sector through its Healthcare Investment Company.
He added: “There are three things we have done in healthcare. First of all, the NSIA has a Healthcare Investment Company, through which we initially wanted to tackle all the challenges in the health sector but we realized that if you take it all at once, you are probably not going to succeed.
“So, we decided to do two things, first of all, you showcase an area that is of interest to Nigerians and we took cancer and we went to Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) and said can we take over your cancer centre and rebuild it? Secondly, we now built two world-class diagnostic and radiology centres in Kano and Umuahia.
“I am happy to report that those centres have been successful. Initially, we hired a management team from South Africa, it didn’t work, we fired them and built our own management team. At the moment all these are working well; the health company, LUTH cancer centre and the diagnostic centres.”
He also announced that the organisation would soon build 20 cancer centres across the country.
The areas he said the NSIA would intervene are the Lagos-Ibadan and the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano expressways as well as the second Niger bridge as the main interventions of the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration.
He stressed that all projects carried out by the NSIA are the President’s legacy projects and the inauguration of many of them would be done next year.
Orji explained: “In terms of the footprints of our investment through the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF), these are the President’s legacy projects and we are just there as managers of those projects.
“The PIDF was set up in 2018 with an objective of attacking certain areas where we have been stuck as a country. There were some projects that have been on the drawing board for 40 or 50 years, no movement. So, the President decided to isolate them form the current process and create a new funding mechanism to make those projects move faster.
“Second Niger Bridge, for example, has been on the drawing board since 1976 and there was no movement on that project until the PIDF was effectively set up; Lagos-Ibadan expressway faced a similar type of circumstances; Abuja-Kaduna-Kano Road, these are projects that has been stuck, Mambila hydropower project us also there, everybody knows that we need to redo them to make sur that we drive economic activity a bit more effectively.
“So PIDF was set up as a mechanism that creates a vehicle that takes government contribution, NSIA’s contribution and opens the door for investors to come in as a way to make sure we finish these roads on time and the progress has been quite impressive.”
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