Foreign Investors Avoids Nigeria’s Oil Region States as FDIs Move South

Foreign investors appear to be carefully avoiding Nigeria’s oil and gas-rich states, also called the Niger Delta region, as data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on assessment of foreign direct inflows into the nation’s sub-nationals in Q2 of 2022 show that the region’s states were among 32 subnationals which attracted zero dollar foreign inflow since Q2 of 2015.
Additionally, the region, between 2015 and 2022, ranks among the least accessed in terms of foreign capital inflow (foreign direct investment (FDI). For example, another NBS data showed that the region received only 0.51% of the entire Nigeria FDI inflow between 2013 and Q1 of 2020. The region, which once held huge chunks of Nigeria’s FDI inflows in the 1970s and 1980s, barely received $474.13 million out of the $92.28 billion total inflow into Nigeria in the seven-year period.