Nigeria needs $2.3trn to bridge infrastructure gap – Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo says Nigeria will require at least $2.3 trillion over the next 30 years to bridge the infrastructure gap.

He said this yesterday at the opening of a twoday retreat of the National Council on Privatization that deliberated the proposed amendment of the Public Enterprises (Privatization & Commercialization) Act 1999.

Osinbajo, however, said the only way to “effectively” address the massive infrastructural deficit that the country faced “is by Public-Private Partnership arrangement in one form or the other”.

Osinbajo, who cited statistics from Nigerian Integrated Infrastructure Masterplan and the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan 2017-2020 to buttress his point, said: “the review of budgetary allocation for capital expenditure even over the past decade will show that government resources are completely insufficient for this purpose.

“While

government

can take either commercial or concessionary loans for infrastructure development, this is an additional burden on a usually considerably leveraged balance sheet.

“There’s a large pool of investable funds from both local and international investors for the development and maintenance of infrastructure. But these are only accessible where there is a business case to be made for developing public infrastructure.

“So, for both institutional and individual investors, there is far more comfort with lending or with equity participation where a private sector entity partners with a public authority owner of the infrastructure. This way the public partner can play its natural role of a regulator (regulation and policy), leaving business to the private sector whose reason for being is business. So, for investors, PPP presents the best of both worlds”.

Osinbajo stressed the need to develop a framework that would be attractive to investors.