The Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) has said that it would review Nigeria’s power sector privatisation process with a view to removing fundamental flaws that might have cropped up.
The Director-General of the Bureau, Alex Okoh, said that the review would cover customers enumeration, to eliminate estimated billing challenges, improve metering infrastructure, cost-reflective pricing and tariff structure.
Briefing reporters on the activities of the bureau, he said that it had attracted about $7.8 billion Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) to the country within the 18 years of its existence on a net process basis.
“We have privatised, commercialised and reformed about 142 enterprises using various transaction strategies, including core investors and concessioning.
“The privatisation process has been able to attract about $7.8 billion in total Foreign Direct Investments into the country through the privatization of 53 enterprises in the different sectors of the economy,” he said.
On the impact of the activities of the bureau, Okoh said about N400 billion of this year’s Federal budget is projected to have come from the privatisation and commercialisation activities of the bureau.
Speaking further, he said 26 seaports were reformed through concessioning, while Federal Government-owned banking institutions and insurance companies were also privatised by way of share sales in the stock market.
According to him, the Bureau also plans to handle the rehabilitation of the country’s four refineries using private sector resources paid directly to the original refinery builders to handle the repairs.
He stressed that the bureau’s reform agenda also covered agriculture, automobile, hotels and tourism, steel and aluminium companies, while sectoral reform saw the pension sector revolving into a contributory system.
The power sector, he noted was the most recent beneficiary of the reforms, which affect the generation and distribution end of the power chain
He added that the liberalisation of the telecom sector is one of the agency’s achievements, noting that prior to reforms, the sector had only 500,000 functional telephone lines.
