Madam Lulu Xingwan – South Africa High Commissioner to Ghana
Madam Lulu Xingwana, the South Africa High Commissioner, has called on African business leaders to consider rural areas in their investment options.
She said the business community should look at projects, which could be operated in the rural areas to create the needed development to their various countries.
Madam Xingwana was speaking during a business panel discussion on how the Gauteng Province, from South Africa could do business with their Ghanaian counterparts in Accra.
She commended Ghana for being one of the best countries on the African continent for its stable good governance and peaceful transition.
She also lauded government for its efforts to promote high quality of education in the country and expressed the hope that more areas of the economy would also get the needed attention.
She said the business delegation from the Gauteng Province was looking to invest in Ghana and use the country as an extension to other parts of the West Africa Sub-region.
The High Commissioner urged investors from the Province to invest in the areas of energy, oil and gas and other areas that interest them.
She called on Ghanaian businesses looking forward to invest in South Africa to direct their attention to the information communication technology sector.
Mr Saki Zamxaka, the CEO of Gauteng Growth and Development Agency said like South Africa, Ghana was one of the most fascinating economics on the continent.
He said the reasons for investors from the Province wanting to invest in Ghana were the country’s reforms, robust democracy, which had ushered the country into a number of peaceful change of leaderships.
He said: “This has been exactly the kind of stability foreign investors we are looking for.”
Mr Zamxaka, who is also the leader of the delegation said intra-Africa trade had been low on the Africa continent and it was time for Africans to do business with each other to grow and develop the continent.
He said as a Province, they were looking for investment opportunities outside their country, where they could learn innovative ways of doing business from the East to the West of the continent.
The CEO called on governments across the continent to formulate good policies that would create and provide confidence for investment opportunities for investors.
Mr Karl Nelson, the Chief Operating Officer, Ghana Investment Promotion Centre, said Ghana had clear laws protecting foreign investors and encouraged investors not to entertain any fear in investing in the country.
He said the Centre had restructured their investment drive more towards specific and targeted projects to draw investors into the country.
He said more attention had been shifted to promoting local business to enable them contribute their quota to the development of the economy.
Source: GNA
