President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is scheduled to take his administration’s aggressive push for attracting more foreign direct investments and infrastructure boost into Nigeria to Saudi Arabia, where he will attend two bilateral summits.
According to the President’s spokesman, the events are targeted at different areas of interests, but noted that the outings are going to be critical to how Nigeria takes advantage of the projected potentials of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), market.
He said the Saudi-African Summit’s target will be exploring issues around the economic ties between Africa and Saudi Arabia, including counter-terrorism, agriculture, environment and other areas of mutual concern.
For the second, being the Arab-African Summit, according to Ngelale, will be focusing on expanding infrastructure between both regions and will particularly be paying attention to the establishment of a new high-speed train network between the Arab League of Nations and the African Union countries.
“His Excellency President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, will be heading to Riyadh, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to attend two major summits. The first of which is the Saudi-Africa Summit, at which several areas of mutual concern will be addressed with respect to the economic ties between the regions with respect to the issues of counterterrorism, the environment, agriculture, and many other areas of mutual concern, where we feel much more can be done in terms of accelerating the level of trade and investment between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the African continent.
“Obviously, His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is very keen on ensuring that the Federal Republic of Nigeria, within the context of the continent, is in a position to maximally leverage on opportunities that will be afforded by the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, where we will be having a single trade market of over one billion Africans, the expectation, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, is that by the year 2050, our market here on the continent would have surpassed $29 trillion. We believe that action toward that begins now.
“So the President is going to be very active and leading that effort from the forefront. That will be holding on November 10, followed by a very important summit. That is the Arab-African Summit holding on November 11, where His Excellency, President Bola Tinubu in his capacity, not just as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but also as the Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of Government, will be taking part in the summit, ensuring that he is at the forefront of advocating for really a deepening partnership of the two regions, that is the League of Arab Nations as well as the African Union, with respect to how we can integrate in terms of our infrastructure, how we can facilitate the establishment of a new high speed train network that would league that would tie Arab nations from the Middle East and Northern Africa, to the rest of the African continent”, he said.
