Re: FCCPC and the Presidency’s FDI drive

The opinion piece by one “Elu Moses” (published in The Punch Newspaper of June 16, 2026) is a masterclass in what skilled propagandists call the “noble cause substitution”. You take a nakedly commercial interest, in this case, the protection of a specific foreign operator’s revenue stream from regulatory oversight, and you dress it in the language of national development, investment climate, and economic patriotism. You invoke the President’s name. You warn of catastrophe. You gesture towards abstract billions. And you hope that nobody notices the man behind the curtain.

Nigerians should notice. Because the curtain, in this instance, is remarkably thin.

Let us begin with what the Moses piece conspicuously fails to tell us. It does not tell us which specific foreign enterprise is so vital to Nigeria’s digital future that it must be shielded from the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission. It does not tell us how many Nigerians this enterprise employs. It does not tell us what taxes it pays to the Nigeria Revenue Service. It does not tell us what physical infrastructure it has built on Nigerian soil. It does not tell us what knowledge it has transferred to Nigerian engineers and technologists. It does not tell us what its profit margins look like, where those profits are domiciled, or what percentage of the value it extracts from Nigerian consumers is reinvested in Nigeria.

Moses’ piece employs several argumentative devices that deserve direct rebuttal. First is the insinuation that the FCCPC is contradicting the presidency’s FDI drive. This framing inverts reality with considerable skill. The FCCPC’s mandate to ensure competitive markets, protect consumers, and prevent exploitative commercial practices is not in tension with legitimate foreign investment. It is its precondition. Serious institutional investors, the sovereign wealth funds, the development finance institutions, and the global private equity firms whose capital President Bola Tinubu’s administration is courting in Davos and Washington conduct rigorous due diligence. What they seek is not the absence of regulation. They seek regulatory predictability, institutional credibility, and the knowledge that markets operate on transparent rules applied equally to all participants.

What genuinely deters serious FDI is the opposite of what the Moses piece implies. It is the perception that Nigeria is a soft state, that its regulators can be neutralised by sufficiently aggressive lobbying, that its institutions fold under commercial pressure, and that opacity and political connection are better protections than genuine compliance. An FCCPC that backs down from legitimate regulatory action because a foreign operator plants threatening opinion pieces in national newspapers would be a far more powerful deterrent to serious investment than an FCCPC that enforces its mandate consistently and fearlessly.

For an article ostensibly about defending foreign direct investment, this is a breathtaking series of omissions. Real foreign direct investment, the kind that creates jobs, builds capacity, transfers technology, and deepens local value chains, tends to leave evidence. Factories. Offices. Payroll records. Tax receipts. Graduate training programmes. Research partnerships with Nigerian universities.

But make no mistake about it: Moses’ piece is the latest in the series of coordinated media onslaughts against the FCCPC by vested interests unwilling to forgo the undue advantage they had enjoyed in Nigeria for donkey years without regulatory scrutiny.

The audacity is, in its own way, impressive. Several of the commercial arrangements now under regulatory examination were established and consolidated during a period when Nigeria did not have a modern competition and consumer protection framework. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in 2018. For years before that, Nigeria’s market was, from a competition law perspective, essentially a frontier, a place where arrangements that would have attracted immediate regulatory attention in the United States, the European Union, or indeed South Africa itself could operate without meaningful scrutiny.

Moses frames the entire dispute as a conflict between Nigeria’s regulatory instincts and Nigeria’s investment needs. But this framing conceals the most important question of all: investment for whom?

Foreign direct investment that creates jobs, builds infrastructure, transfers skills, pays taxes, stimulates local supply chains, and competes fairly in open markets is among the most powerful engines of development available to an emerging economy. Nigeria wants and needs such investment. President Tinubu’s administration is right to pursue it.

But not every commercial arrangement that involves a foreign entity qualifies as foreign direct investment in any meaningful developmental sense. A foreign company that participates in Nigerian consumer markets through a locally incorporated subsidiary with minimal physical presence, employs few Nigerians in substantive roles, domiciles its profits offshore, and resists every effort by Nigerian authorities to examine its practices is not, in any serious economic sense, investing in Nigeria. It is extracted from Nigeria. A predator.

Some enterprises, including Optasia, built their Nigerian market positions precisely during that period of regulatory vacuum. They grew accustomed to operating without the discipline that competition law imposes. They structured their commercial relationships in ways that made sense in the absence of a regulator empowered to ask hard questions about market dominance, consumer disclosure, and competitive fairness.

Then Nigeria grew up. The FCCPC is not an aberration. It is not an invention of the current administration designed to harass foreign investors.

It is the product of a legislative decision by the National Assembly to bring Nigeria into the community of nations that take competition and consumer protection seriously.

Every G20 economy has such a framework. South Africa has had its Competition Commission since 1998. The European Union’s competition regime is among the most rigorous in the world. The United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division has been operating for over a century.

Nobody calls the EU’s enforcement of competition law “anti-FDI”, and nobody accuses the South African Competition Commission of “repelling investment” when it investigates dominant firms or interrogates market structure.