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Richard Armitage was the 13th United States Deputy Secretary of State, serving from 2001 to 2005. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and then after the[…]

The answer isn’t in regulation, Armitage says.

Question: How do you track foreign investment?

Armitage:    Well you don’t regulate it.  If it’s going into a state, the states have to make their own regulations, and many of them do . . . some of them more than others.  South Africa is a pretty good regulatory    . . .  Ghana is pretty good.  Mozambique is working on it.  So you have to depend on them to regulate it, and their own regulations concerning telecom, concerning mineral development . . . development of mineral rights, gas and oil rights, these are not insignificant or . . . peoples, nor are they unsophisticated peoples.  So they’ll regulate it.  The instability in Nigeria is very much a North-South instability and a tribal instability.  And I must say that looking at the city of Lagos, it’s a huge, sprawling city.  I’m frightened almost every morning that I’m gonna wake up and see it just exploding.  In terms of U.S. money going in, it’s primarily been ___________ money.  There are regulations concerning it.  There are always funds that when we send funds overseas through our banks, etc., there is a look by our government of who the end user is.  So I’m not as worried about U.S. money going to bad people as I am the governments of those various states not making the right use or making the right choices with the monies they have.


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