The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun said at the African Development Bank Knowledge Sharing Forum in Abuja that the Federal Government is committed to improve the operation of Public, Private Partnership arrangement in the country.
According to the Minister, the Federal Government believes that Public Private Partnership is extremely important to the drive to restore and resolve the infrastructure of this country, saying that solving the nation’s infrastructure problem would unlock the potential of the economy and get Nigeria out of the current challenges.
“As far as our financial strategy is concerned, we are very committed to PPP and for us, the way to accelerate it is for the Federal Government to de-risk the involvement of the private sector and gradually, introduce the private sector to the PPP. This is because if we wait for every law to be changed and regulations to be amended, we will really not get any single project done,” the Minister stated.
She disclosed that the Federal Government plans to start with a number of transactions in 2017 and that it will use the federal guarantee to simply take the risk away from the risky avarices of the projects of, for example, road projects which are risky.
“So we will de-risk; we will guarantee and will allow private money to crowd in to these transactions. It is something we must crack because clearly, our infrastructure deficit is so large that even if we spend our entire budget on infrastructure for the next five years, we cannot bridge the gap, so we must be able to get private money,” she stated.
