Osinbajo woos investors for power sector

ACTING President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday told investors that they would not regret investing in Nigeria especially in the power sector.

Speaking at a forum organized by Nigerian Initiative for Economic Development at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, he said government was addressing all the issues constraining the sector in order to open it up.

He recalled that investors who failed to take advantage of the telecom opportunities in Nigeria at time GSM was introduced have regretted it.

He noted: “But in about a year of the licenses being granted all of those who did not invest in it, the big telecom companies who did not invest in it, found themselves holding the short end.

“They realized that it was a huge mistake because in five years MTN had shown that the telecom sector in Nigeria was just incredibly profitable. They had made profit in one year.”

Osinbajo added: “So, really, Nigeria is a place that is waiting to happen and it will happen. That’s really the point. It will happen.

“The truth of the matter is that any country that opens itself to free enterprise, the way Nigeria is opening itself to free enterprise, will somehow find that it will work.

“That is one of the critical things that we are bringing into the mix. We are insisting that the only way that this country can make the profit that it needs to make is by private sector investment, beginning with local investment.

“That’s why we are working so hard on making the investment climate profitable and easy for those who are doing business already, because we believe that those who are doing business already will invariably bring in those who want to do business from outside the country, foreign investment etcetera.”

The Acting President remarked that government intended to push the private sector and was doing everything to encourage them to come and invest.

He said: “Look at the power sector for example; the power sector is almost completely privatized.  But we have had difficulties because of tariffs, for example.

“Many times you look at our power sector, we have an installed capacity of about 12,000 megawatts today but we are only able to put on the grid under 5,000, a little above 4,000 megawatts.

“But we know that the potential is way beyond that maybe four or five times that.

“But what do we do to ensure that we realize that potential?  What we need to do is to make this profitable for the private sector.

“So, we are working on the whole value chain.  We are trying to free up that value chain, beginning with working on tariffs, and then, looking at the how, at the moment we have problem of liquidity in the value chain and we are addressing that.”

He spoke of efforts to revive the power sector, stressing that there has been a massive payment assurance scheme of over N701 billion into the power value chain to free it up while the issue of tariff was also being addressed.

“Once we are able to do that and we address the issue of tariffs we open it up again. And then people can come in and the big investors can come in and invest in power,” he stated.