Building Nigeria’s Sovereign Wealth Fund from the beginning was not an easy task for Uche Orji, the pioneer Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) who spent most of his career years in the United States and United Kingdom before taking over the NSIA.
In just eleven years from 2011, the NSIA has been built into a multi-billion-dollar asset fund. In September 2021, Assets Under Management was over $3.5bn. This was as a result of the ingenuity of the NSIA boss and the management team.
The NSIA was launched to invest in infrastructure, build up a savings pot for future generations and safeguard Nigeria’s fragile oil economy against commodity price shocks.
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But the decision to take up the role of establishing a Sovereign Wealth Fund for Nigeria was a hard nut to crack for Orji.
At the time Mr. Olusegun Aganga, the then Minister of Finance invited Orji who admitted he was reluctant to take up the role in a country he left after 17 years.
“The decision to move was not an easy one. My wife particularly struggled with it, and I did struggle with it. I initially rejected the invitation. I didn’t want to do it. I was having a wonderful time doing what I was doing in New York,” he shared in a 2021 interview with Hakeem Belo-Osagie, a Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School.
Orji said he made up his mind to build the NSIA alongside others when he realized he would have no reason to complain if “somebody else took that job and ruined it.”
When he finally accepted the offer, Mr. Kayode Ogunro, the Assistant of the then-Finance Minister was there to help him establish the NSIA.
At the time, the NSIA had no office and there was no accommodation provided for him to embark on the entrepreneurial venture.
Orji said, “He (Kayode Ogunro) went to the Ministry of Finance and found a room that at the time looked like a broom closet, but they had dumped all sorts of things inside it. Got someone to clean the room. He actually paid them, I remember, to change the locks – to put a lock. There was no lock on the room. That was the first office. It was Room 406 at the Nigerian Ministry of Finance.”
The office was later moved to a rented apartment where Orji and Ogunro lived.
The NSIA boss explained that the Federal Government did not transfer the capital for management to the new agency as there were struggles between it and the Central Bank of Nigeria.
“We started looking to hire people, put together a business plan – which initially was difficult, because we had called McKinsey to help us write it,” he revealed.
He added, “McKinsey quoted what I felt was an astronomical amount of money. And I said, OK, now I’ll write it myself. I wrote the first draft and Stella (Ojekwe-Onyejeli, Executive Director/Chief Risk Officer, Kayode and Obinna Ihedioha (the first staff I requested to be seconded by the DFID) and I put it all together, got it approved by the Board, and started to implement this ‘rudimentary plan’ which remained our guide for the next 10 years.”
He also recounted how it was difficult to get service providers to support the NSIA, adding “Everyone assumed NSIA was not real, and Nigeria was not the best counter-party.
“So, eventually, getting people hired was the next challenge. We had no money because we were self-funding ourselves. I went to the Department for International Development (DFID), the British government, who at the time were also funding Kayode, to help with deploying consultants.
“They were gracious enough to hire on our behalf about five consultants. That’s how we started building the organization.”
According to him, $1bn seed capital was released a few months later by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala so they could start hiring staff.
“She (Okonjo-Iweala) was a fantastic source of support,” he confessed.
He added, “The other thing that struck me at the NSIA was not just because I didn’t know many people, but it was the hostility of the State Governors. The hostility towards the NSIA in 2012 was shocking – really shocking.”