Nigeria needs additional $113bn for critical sectors development – BPE

By Etuka Sunday

The Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Mr Benjamin Ezra Dikki has disclosed that additional $113 billion would be required to develop three critical sectors of the nation’s economy.

Dikki who gave the estimate while presenting a paper at the Annual General Meeting of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) titled: Making Nigeria Work – A dialogue between the Real Sector and the Reformer, gave the names of the sectors to be Oil and Gas, Power and Transport.

He revealed that to modernize the Nigerian transport system, investments of about $33billion will be required in six years for Roads and Rails development to undertake rehabilitation and modernisation of the Nigerian Railway and the construction of new Road networks across the country.

The BPE DG said that in the next six years, Nigeria will require about $18 – $20billion of investment in the power sector.

In a statement by the Head, Public Communications, BPE, Chigbo Anichebe, Dikki noted that in the next six years, Nigeria will require about $60billion investments in Oil & Gas to unleash the potentials in the Sector.

He said government was not in a position to finance all these investment requirements thus the private sector needs to participate in investing in the various sectors of Oil and Gas, roads, railways, inland water ways and so on. It is in order to attract these needed private sector investments that government through the transformation agenda is fine tuning policies and legal and regulatory frameworks to give confidence to the private sector to invest.

He emphasised that the enactment of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and transport bills midwife by BPE will be critical. He added that without the passage of the bills, the country is estimated to be losing for example an additional revenue of about US $287m in accruals to government from the three Production Sharing Contracts every month the PIB is not passed

On the impact of reform and privatization on the nation’s economy, the Director General said the BPE has concluded reforms in eight sectors of the economy namely Telecommunications, Power, Banking and Finance, Marine, Mining, Industrial, Steel, and Oil and Gas, Government has also so far Privatized 123 enterprises including the recently concluded Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) successor companies and realized over N564.3 billion.

Dikki further noted that the reform of the telecommunications and banking sectors remain so far the most successful in terms of their impact on the Nigerian economy. He added that Nigeria’s tele-density has been raised from about 450,000 telephone lines in 2001 to over 134.5 million as at September 2014.