The bureaucratization of investment procedures in Algeria has “deterred foreign or national investors”, admitted this Sunday, February 13, the director general of the National Agency for the Development of Investment (ANDI), Mustapha Zikara.
He called, during his appearance on the Algerian Radio, for a change of mentality. “There are several blocking factors” of investment projects, relating to “the absence of mechanisms for monitoring files that were under judicial investigation”, admitted Zikara.
One of the blocking factors relates to the lack of coordination and consultation between different sectors. “We don’t know how to work together, I agree. This kind of relationship should be decided and fixed beforehand and very clear procedures must be put in place to avoid overlapping of attributions, ”launched Mustapha Zikara.
“People being jealous of their attributions”
The CEO of Andi adds: “People being jealous of their attributions reserve the right to do what they think they are doing well. This creates a terrible bureaucratic climate”.
Referring to the new investment code, Mustapha Zikara explained that the essence of this text consists in limiting the field of intervention of the CNI (National Investment Council), and removing from it all that is the management of files at strictly speaking.
Which management will be transferred to ANDI. To lighten the act of investing, Zikara suggested that the CNI stick to its role of defining strategies and priorities, “while keeping missions falling within the competence of the government”.
The CEO of ANDI notes that the blockages observed in the past came from the fact that “the CNI had to decide on investment files”. He recalled that two types of investments go through the CNI: projects whose cost exceeds 5 billion dinars, and projects of which foreigners are carriers and/or in which they are present in the shareholding.
The other factor lies in the scourge of bureaucracy which “is in our culture”, indicated Zikara, who noted contradictions in the regulatory texts governing the act of investing in Algeria.
To overcome all this, the CEO of ANDI suggested moving towards a system “including both the legal and regulatory part. These are even the directives of the public authorities”.
The CEO of ANDI believes that the texts should significantly reduce the bureaucratic aspect through the simplification of procedures. To this end, Zikara acknowledged that the digitization of the various procedures suffers from the fact that these are “complicated and bureaucratic in the texts”. “It will be necessary to simplify these procedures in order to be able to digitize them”, he recommended.
The number of projects registered with ANDI, for the year 2021, amounts to 1,877 projects, including only one FDI. The amount of the projects amounts to 526 billion dinars with regard to the 1,877 projects, for nearly 47,000 jobs envisaged.
The total of projects in 2021 is in repression compared to the year 2020. A regression is mainly explained by two factors. “The first is due to the law which has been delayed considerably since 2020. The second aspect is due to the freezing in the 2020 finance law of the allocation of industrial land, a factor that has contributed to the decline in the number of development projects. investment,” said Mustapha Zikara.
The CEO of Andi indicated that of the approximately 900 investment files which were blocked for various reasons, 890 have experienced a thaw since December 2021, and are in the process of entering into activity.
