By Nosakhare Agbonigiarhuoyi
The Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, has said that the State is expecting investments worth half a billion dollars in oil palm production and related areas.
Obaseki said this while speaking as a special guest on a webinar, Friday, June 10, 2022, organized by the Lagos Business School (LBS), with the topic: “Edo State: The Journey So Far and Opportunities for Private Sector Participation.”
According to the Governor, the goal of his administration is to make Edo State one of the top three States in terms of GDP ranking in Nigeria before 2030.
He outlined three areas that will serve as vehicles in achieving this feat, namely; Technology, Agriculture and Manufacturing.
Speaking on Agriculture, he said: “We are producers of value crops like oil palm and rubber in the agricultural space. We have almost 20 million hectares of quality arable land in swamp, rainforest and savannah.
“Our focus is to take advantage of our very good arable land and history of agriculture by organizing agriculture, using modern methods.”
Furthermore, the Governor said: “What we have done is to look at scaling up Agriculture; and we can only do that from value crops, and we have the advantage of oil palm.
“We have a very well organized oil palm programme where we are giving out 120,000 hectares of land. The first 60,000 hectares have already been allocated. We are expecting investments of about half a billion dollars.
“As I speak, two of the seven investors have just finished land preparation, and are currently in the process of setting up their nurseries.”
“The key here is that it just brings a whole lot of capacity into the State in terms of how to organize farms, how to mechanize and extension services”, he added.
Obaseki also cited other areas of investment opportunities such as the Benin Enterprise Park; Edo Culture District; Benin River Port; and new towns development.
The moderators of the event were Frank Aigbogun, Publisher, Business Day (Nigeria); Wole Abu, Chief Executive Officer, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Nigeria; while the anchor was Dr. Franklin Ngwu, Director, Public Sector Initiative, Lagos Business School.