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Alhaji Mustafa Bello, the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) said yesterday that more than 11 billion dollars worth of investments came into Nigeria in 2009.

Bello told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja, that although getting exact statistics was still difficult, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) country assessment put Nigeria 19th in the world last year for attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs).

“It shows that we may have gone beyond the five billion dollars we were having annually in previous years, we may have captured much more than that in terms of figures in 2009. Some have quoted 12 billion dollars, some have quoted 11 billion dollars.

“So, maybe we look at around 11 billion dollars as what came in last year. He noted that the country had been having problems getting the exact figures, saying that even the agency of government like the National Bureau of Statistics that should be responsible for providing such figures at times, had difficulty in providing exact figures.

UNCTAD which does country assessment for various countries has come out clearly to show that as at last year we were number 19 in attracting FDI, a position which we were not in the previous year,’’ he said. According to him, when this is translated, the aggregate investment inflow should be about 60 billion dollars over a period of almost 10 years.

Bello said the country performed well in 2009 in terms of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which was still over five per cent. He said that in October 2008 a delegation of 670 people came from Japan to Nigeria and that a similar delegation visited Nigeria in 2009.

“So I will say that 2009 was quite an eventful year, we hope to see a lot more happening in 2010. “By the end of this month we are receiving a large delegation of 170 coming from Turkey and we just received in January a 13-member delegation from Switzerland.

On the sectors of the economy that investments were mostly attracted, Bello said that most of those who came were mostly in the services sector. He said that the telecoms sector was the leading sector among many other sectors coming for investment in the country.

“We have also seen those in manufacturing, especially agro-alied companies coming to add value to the processed and semi-processed sectors. “We have also seen a lot of expansion in indomie production, many people have gone into the production of noodles now,” he said.