The Federal Government said it would strengthen the Public-Private Partnership arrangement to enable it to use the model to effectively address the huge infrastructure deficit in the country.
The government said it would achieve this by addressing the challenges currently facing the effective implementation of PPP agreements in the country.
The Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, said the need to address the impediments became imperative since the PPP contract was a reliable option for bridging Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit.
Ahmed stated this in Abuja at the opening of a workshop on the PPP management in the public sector organised for Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the government.
She said the workshop was organised to enhance Nigeria’s PPP management capability in line with the priority of the present administration of building a competitive economy.
This, she added, would improve the business environment for increased private sector investment in infrastructure development.
The minister stated, “The gap in the PPP management capabilities in federal MDAs has been identified as a major constraint to optimising PPP investments.
“The skill sets and readiness to manage investments that may come in the form of the PPP initiatives are generally inadequate and sometimes non-existent.”
Ahmed explained that Nigeria’s Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan would require funding of over $166bn, adding that an effective PPP arrangement was vital in raising the needed funds to bridge the infrastructure gap.
She said that the current economic realities in the local and global environments, caused by falling oil prices in the international market, and shortfall in daily oil output, have seriously constrained government’s ability to increase investment in infrastructure development.
