‘NSIA recorded unprecedented

With huge intervention in major segments of the economy, the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) is fast becoming a strong backbone for the country, which presently yearns for exemplary leadership. For Eight straight years, the NSIA – manager of

The NSIA reported impressive financial outcomes in 2020, with total comprehensive income surging by as much as 343%. Talk us through that.

There are probably three things to say; one is that last year was very strong for us. If we took out the impact of devaluation, because we had to manage dollar into naira, that’s N51bn naira, we still had about N108bn of core earnings which is three times 2019 earnings, even if we still did devaluation. Obviously, there have been questions around what we did differently and where all the money came from.

Most of it is coming from most of the investments we have made in the international market. Our future generations fund did very well, investments in public equities, if you look at the US capital market, that did extremely well and we invested in that. Markets like Japan did well, we also invested in equities in those places. But the US particularly was a star performer last year, like China where we were also supposed to be heavily invested in.

We started a new strategy in venture capital, which did very well for us as well. In dollar terms, almost 30% return and in naira terms, certainly much more than that, almost 50% return. I can’t tell you the naira numbers exactly, but the dollar I can. Our private equity did very well for us. We invested in private equity for quite a long time, some of the private equity companies did well for us in 2020. Our hedge funds strategy did very well as well, we changed most of our hedge fund managers, appointed new ones, expanded the foot prints and that did well. We also started doing direct trading of ETFS and co-investment with our major capital partners.

So, all in all, these external markets investments were really it, followed by the foreign exchange gains, these were really the big engine last year. The third area was infrastructure, we operationalized our health care projects which are now producing real revenues and that reduced the losses that we made at the start-off phase. We have also seen significant improvement in institutional investments, so, Infracredit, NMRC; all these companies are doing better now and contributing to our earnings. We have also turned many elements of the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative from a loss centre to a profit centre for the NSIA. But more importantly is that the restructuring took a lot of budget out of NSIA books into the ministry of finance incorporated books. These are the things that reflected in the returns. But the real returns engine of NSIA is the future generation fund where a lot of returns came from international market investments.

NSIA is obviously big in Nigeria’s infrastructure development. Can you speak on your current strategy in this regard?

What has changed is that the NSIA is bigger now. The Presidential Fertilizer Initiative has changed or is changing. Up until last year, NSIA did everything, from the transportation, logistics, blending, storage, sales, import of raw materials, so it was a contract manufacturing relationship. The fertiliser blenders association worked with NSIA, because it was our product, we ran the whole thing. Now the relationship is changed, power is being transferred to them and the contract now has restricted NSIA to using its balance sheet and its reputation to bring in discounted raw materials, which we give to blenders, and they now pay. With this, NSIA is 100% secured, no risk, the blenders take the responsibility of transportation, logistics, blending, sales, all of that, not us. That’s how we are different from the rest of the public, the PFI has changed and this in my opinion is very important.

The intervention of NSIA has delivered its result, the industry is revived, fertiliser price has crashed, domestic production has increased, we came from seven blending plants or less to over 44 as at the end of last year and over 50 now. The industry balance sheet has improved, the quantity of fertiliser produced is the highest ever produced in the country, even higher than when we were doing phased importation. With all of that, jobs have been created, direct and indirect jobs reaching over 200,000. So job done!

In healthcare, the revenues at the health care centres have improved better than expected, they are all now running ahead of plan, they are not yet fully all profitable, but we are close and that has been a major thing. We learnt our lessons, we removed those who used to run the thing in Lagos, we changed them and created an in-house management team for our cancer centre, this has been successful. Now we are feeling confident that we are going to do many more centres, the plan we have over the medium term is to roll out 20 centres in healthcare.

In agriculture, our farm in Nasarawa is a work of art, you need to behold it, it’s really great. Most of the investments have been made with our partners, we are moving to Gurara, into Edo, Imo, Abia, Adamawa and even Lagos where there are opportunities in fishery.

Obviously, we are putting in more and more capital, but I think that the most exciting things for us now and which will keep us busy is the operationalization and commissioning capital raise for the PIDF projects and full concession and then the innovation fund.

As the NSIA pulls out of the fertiliser initiative, what structures will ensure continued profitability?

The industry was there, we only helped them come