Yemisi Izuora/Joseph Bakare
Financial constraints currently affecting the power sector reform has prompted the Federal Government, the World Bank and private sector operators to schedule a meeting next month in Abuja to address some of the seeming financial challenges gap in the sector.
The Minister for Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, who disclosed this said that the meeting which is fixed for November would be attended by the World Bank Group, International Finance Corporation (IFC), Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) which provided partial risk guarantees.
Other participants include the Ministry of Power, Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for the gas perspective, the electricity generating companies (Gencos), and distribution companies (Discos), including other stakeholders in the power sector.
According to Adeosun, the World Bank is bringing a specialists power finance team to see how they can proffer financial solutions to the challenges of power in Nigeria.
“We also met with JICA, the Japan International Cooperation Agency at the last concluded IMF/ World Bank Annual meeting and we secured their commitment to facilitate trade and investment in Nigeria, specifically they have agreed to make investments in agriculture, fisheries sector and we have made progress on the Jebba hydro projects which is also a power project,” she said.
Adeosun said they met also with her constituency which represents South Africa, Nigeria and Angola and reviewed the fact that the allocation to this constituency is among the poorest, particularly from the IFC.
She noted that, “Is unacceptably low, so what we have agreed to do is that we will be hosting a meeting in Abuja in March for the three finance ministers and the idea is that we will benchmark and scale up our technical capacity to ensure that we are able to get more of what is available for the three countries.
“We also secured commitments from the Canadian Ministry of Finance to support us in the Public Private Partnership (PPP) platform for roads they have successfully developed.”