The Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Mr. Benjamin Ezra Dikki has estimated that Nigeria requires fresh injection of about $113 billion in six years for the development of three critical sectors of the nation’s economy, namely Oil and Gas, Power and Transport.
He made this known in a paper presented at the Annual General Meeting of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) titled: Making Nigeria Work – A dialogue between the Real Sector and the Reformer.
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.
He indicated that in the next six years, Nigeria will require about $18 – $20billion of investment in the power sector. He posited that the current reforms in the sector has enabled the private sector to invest in the rehabilitation of existing infrastructure and in new projects.
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.
Access to telecommunication facilities has greatly improved the ease of doing business and especially;Improved ease of communications between business partners thereby reducing costs;Increased the number of employees in the telecom sector (GSM phone sellers, repairers and recharge card sellers etc) and Increased volume of investment in the sector: For example telecom contribution to Nigeria’s GDP is now 8.53%, compared to less than 3% in 2001.
