Former governor of Abia State Okezie Victor Ikpeazu has said that Nigerians and Africans must improve on their research and study on the successes of China in order to produce data that will enable them to understand the Chinese system for economic development.
Ikpeazu said this while speaking to reporters on Thursday in Abuja at the presentation in a book entitled “Contemporary Legal Cooperation: China and Africa—A Contemporary Survey of Legal Systems”, authored by Daily Trust judiciary editor John C. Azu.
Ikpeazu noted that Nigerians can learn from the evolution of the growth of China, whose leaders turned the large country of 1.3 billion people into highly skilled citizens making the country the manufacturing hub of the world and the second largest economy in the world.
Ikpeazu recalled how he had intensified partnership with the Chinese to set up a textile industry and others in Abia during his tenure as a governor, even as he urged China to assist Nigeria with the necessary support to transform its potential into actual wealth.
“If you want to move your country, or any business for that matter, from one part to the other, the most important thing is strategy and you can’t develop a good strategy if you don’t have a proper understanding of data or information on where you are going,” the former governor said.
“It might surprise you to note that there is hardly any inch that the Chinese don’t know about in this country but we know so little about them; the only things we know are the beautiful things coming from China, their strong GDP and their efforts to eradicate poverty,” he added.
He lauded the author for his courage to write on the legal systems of both countries in his research, saying that “If you want to do business in China you must understand the legal system and what it takes to do business in China, how they operate and behave.”
The book reviewer, a research fellow at the Nigerian Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution and a part-time professor at the Zhejiang Normal University, China, Dr Olalekan Babatunde, said that the book has provided a valuable instrument for navigating some of the legal challenges that may arise in China-Nigeria cooperation.
Speaking during the dialogue session, a China investment lawyer, Nnamdi Ahaiwe, who has represented Chinese firms in Nigeria, warned against misinformation around Chinese activities in Nigeria. He stressed that the allegations of violation of workers’ rights, illegal mining and poor wages against Chinese firms were mostly found untrue.
“We have those concerns about the Chinese already because I have been involved in some of those issues, we see how they fly those things on social media; we know that Nigerian firms do all those things three times worse because they (companies) are all humans and not angels,” Ahaiwe said.
The author told reporters that he was motivated to write the book to add to the trove of literature that exist about China and expand the dialogue on the legal framework that will improve business deals between Nigeria and China.
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