It will take Nigeria $2.3 trillion over the next 30 years to fix the country’s infrastructural deficit, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo said on Thursday.
This was contained in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Laolu Akande.
According to Akande, Osinbajo spoke at the opening of a two-day retreat of the National Council on Privatisation.
He explained that the council would among other things, deliberate the proposed amendment of the Public Enterprises (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act 1999.
In the statement was titled, ‘How to access local, global funds to develop Nigeria’s infrastructure, by Osinbajo’, the Vice President cited statistics from Nigerian Integrated Infrastructure Masterplan and the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan 2017-2020 to support his claim.
He said, “Nigeria will require at least $2.3 trillion over the next 30 years to bridge this gap.”
He also said that “the review of budgetary allocation for capital expenditure even over the past decade will show that government resources are completely insufficient for this purpose.”
The statement read in detail, “There is 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.”
While he urged participants to drawn from the private and public sectors at the retreat to remain focused on the objectives of the meeting, Osinbajo reiterated that developing a framework that would be attractive to investors should be topmost in their deliberations.
In his opening remarks earlier, the Director-General of BPE, Mr Alex Okoh, stated that the current economic environment required the government to adopt innovative ways of attracting resources for infrastructure development.