President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday met with Chief Executive Officers of Dutch companies in Hague.
He assured them of a safe and secure Nigeria, where their investments would be safe and yield handsome returns.
A statement issued by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, said the President assured the CEOs of a safe and secure Nigeria, where their investments would be safe and yield handsome returns.
He said: “Stability was the first thing in our campaigns. You have to secure a country first, before you can efficiently manage it. Before businesses can thrive, security is paramount. That is why we lay so much emphasis on securing the country.
“After security, our next emphasis is reviving the economy, and then, fighting corruption.”
He commended the many Dutch-owned companies operating in Nigeria for dealing fairly, noting that with many of them “the relationship dates back to more than two generations and it is now almost a blood relationship rather than commercial.”
Urging the businesses to build factories in Nigeria, and source raw materials locally rather than wholesale import, President Buhari said he was impressed with the economic cooperation between Nigeria and Netherlands.
On Royal Dutch Shell and the harnessing of Nigeria’s gas potentials, the President said: “We are more of a gas than petroleum producing country. We should be making more money from gas today than we make from petroleum. But the plans we made were scuttled.
“When I was Petroleum Minister (in the 1970s) for three-and-a-quarter years, the plan we had was to have 12 LNG trains by 1983, but more than a generation later, we are just on the 7th train. This was because some people came and did just what they liked. If they knew what they were doing, we would have gone very far by now.”
