The National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) contributes no more than 30 per cent of the capital required for its industrial partnerships, leaving private-sector partners to provide at least 70 per cent of the funding, its Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Khalil Suleiman Halilu, has said.
Halilu said the financing model was designed to use limited government resources to attract significantly larger pools of private capital into local manufacturing and technology projects.
Speaking during an interview on the Nativeland Podcast, the NASENI boss said some partnerships involve an even smaller financial commitment from the agency, with NASENI holding stakes as low as eight per cent in some projects.
“We don’t contribute more than 30 per cent in any partnership,” Halilu said. “For every naira that NASENI puts into a partnership, it gets two extra.”
“If you bring 30 per cent at max, somebody needs to bring the 70 per cent. And we have partnerships that we only own eight per cent, which means somebody is bringing 92 per cent.”
Halilu described the model as a deliberate attempt to multiply the impact of public funds while transferring a greater proportion of the financial risk associated with industrial projects to private investors.
“We are having a creative way of using government money to attract more money,” he said.
According to him, the willingness of private companies to commit the majority of the capital to a project also provides an additional test of its commercial viability.
Where an investor is prepared to provide as much as 70 to 90 per cent of the financing, Halilu argued, the private company bears substantially more financial risk than the government agency.
“The more they put, the more it builds our confidence that we’re going into the right partnership because somebody from the private sector is taking the largest risk—the bulk of the risk,” he said.
The financing strategy forms part of NASENI’s attempt to build commercially sustainable partnerships rather than relying entirely on government expenditure to establish manufacturing operations.
Under the model described by Halilu, NASENI provides counterpart funding while its private partners contribute the majority of the investment required to establish production.
But financing is only one part of the arrangement.
Halilu said NASENI also provides what he described as “government leverage,” including the agency’s institutional backing and assistance in connecting locally produced goods with potential government customers.
He said access to markets was critical to the success of industrial partnerships, arguing that technological innovation without customers would ultimately fail to translate into sustainable businesses.
“If you are partnering with people, you need to also help them get market,” Halilu said. “Otherwise, all the fancy innovation doesn’t make sense. It’s going to be just for show.”
This consideration, he said, has informed NASENI’s decision to focus increasingly on products that federal and other government institutions already procure in significant quantities.
Among the products identified by Halilu are laptops, fertiliser, agricultural equipment, drones and medical equipment.
“It only makes sense for us to concentrate now on products that government is already buying,” he said.
NASENI is already involved in the assembly of smart devices, including laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Halilu described the current scale of production as “medium scale,” saying the agency was working to expand the market for the products.
Part of that effort involves encouraging government ministries, departments and agencies to patronise products manufactured or assembled through NASENI-backed partnerships.
The approach effectively combines public-private investment with government procurement: private investors provide most of the capital and production expertise, while NASENI contributes funding, institutional support and access to potential markets.
Halilu said the model was also intended to strengthen investor confidence in NASENI and demonstrate that government-backed industrial projects could attract significant private-sector participation.
His comments point to a broader shift in the agency’s industrialisation strategy—from directly funding projects predominantly with public resources to using government capital as a catalyst for larger private investments.
Under that strategy, the test of NASENI’s partnerships will increasingly be not simply how much government spends on industrial projects, but how much additional private capital each Naira of public investment is able to attract and whether the resulting businesses can find sustainable markets for their products.
