By Mathew Dadiya, Abuja
As the Buhari administration takes stock of its achievements over the years, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, has listed interventions in infrastructure, power, digital economy, ease of doing business and social investment, as some of the regime’s game-changing accomplishments as he emphasized the need for collaboration between fical and monetary policy in order to better manage the economy and exchange rate concerns.
Prof. Osinbajo made the call during his presentation at the opening of the 3rd Ministerial Performance Review Retreat on Monday in Abuja.
The game-changing achievements of the administration listed by the Vice President include: development of infrastructure (roads, rail, power, and broadband infrastructure), especially the creativity introduced to infrastructure financing.
He said: “The discussion that we must now have and going forward is how best to manage the situation by finding a mechanism for increasing supply and moderating demand which will be transparent and will boost confidence.
“I think that a more market-driven approach will be best, some price discovery within the context of a managed float is certainly required.”
Speaking on the development of infrastructure and especially the creativity, he said the administration has introduced to infrastructure financing.
The Vice President boasted, “Clearly, there is no administration to date that has invested anywhere close to our investment in infrastructure, from roads, rail, to power, and broadband infrastructure.
“The financing menu which we adopted includes the Road Infrastructure Development and Refurbishment Investment Tax Credit Policy. This has incentivized the construction of over 1,500km of critical roads in key economic corridors. Under this scheme, the Dangote Group has substantially completed the reconstruction of the 34km Apapa-Oworonshoki-Ojota Expressway and the 43km Obajana-Kabba Road.
“Similarly, Nigeria LNG Limited is on track to complete the 38km Bodo-Bonny Road and Bridges Project by the end of 2023. Recently, the President gave approval to MTN to construct the N202billion Enugu-Onitsha Road.
The second on the menu is the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund (‘PIDF’) managed by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, NSIAwhere we have leveraged more than $1billion in financing to facilitate the accelerated completion of the Second Niger Bridge, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and Abuja-Kano Road.
The third is the Sukkuk Funds, and the fourth is the Infrastructure Corporation of Nigeria (‘InfraCorp’) established in 2021 with a seed capital of N1trillion from the Central Bank of Nigeria CBN, NSIA and the Africa Finance Corporation, AFC. All of these are the innovative ways we are able to fund infrastructure outside of the budget.
First is the improvement in generating capacity today. More than 4,000MW of additional power-generating assets will be completed under the life of this administration. These include the Zungeru Hydro, Kashimbilla Hydro, Afam III Fast Power, Kudenda- Kaduna Power Plant, the Okpai Phase 2 Gas Power Plant, the Dangote Refinery Power Plant and many others.
Recently, KPMG concluded a study showing that while the figure of 4,000MW is the average used daily on the grid, electricity delivered by the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry, NESI on the whole which includes Grid, Captive and Embedded Power is in excess of 8,000MW daily not 4,000MW and also that installed capacity is in excess of 18,000MW, not 13,000MW.
Much of the improvement to 8,000MW has occurred under our administration and they include one, the 28 Grid Power plants with an installed capacity of 13,000MW and operational daily capacities of around 5,000MW. These include Power Plants in Egbin, Ughelli, Geregu, Kainji and others.
There are 266 Captive Power plants (mainly industrial over 1MW) with Installed capacities of 4,000MW and Daily Operational Capacities of around 2,500MW. These include the Dangote Cement Capacities in Obajana Ibese (400MW), and NLNG’s Bonny Island Power Plant (240MW) amongst others.
The Vice President boasted, “Our renewable energy programme has also attained great momentum. The Solar Naija Programme launched under the Economic Sustainability Plan is designed to achieve 5 million solar connections impacting over 25 million Nigerians. the Ministry of Power is also driving an additional N49billion in off-grid funding through the #SolarPowerNaija via the CBN.
“There are also ongoing projects under the #SolarPowerNaija with NDPHC doing N7billion in solar projects, NNPC doing N22billion, NSIA doing N10billion and Infracredit/BOI doing N10billion in solar projects.”
On the rapid expansion of broadband access, Osinbajo noted that in August 2019, the broadband coverage was 33.7% and today it is 44.65%, representing close to 13 million new broadband users, adding that there were 13,823 4G base stations and we now have 36,751, representing a 165.86% increase.
