The Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC) has said the federal government has concluded plans on public-private partnership contractual agreements that will govern public sector agencies and the private sector operators as it seeks to tackle the huge infrastructure deficit in the country.
The Director General of ICRC, Mr. Aminu Adamu Diko, stated this at the weekend in Abuja while speaking with journalists. Under the arrangement, the ICRC boss said some of the projects, which cut across all sectors, would soon be on the market for interested investors to bid for.
Diko revealed that some of the major projects included the Trans Nigeria Gas Pipeline (TNGP) project, a subset of the Trans Saharan Gas Pipeline being executed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) worth over $5 billion. He said when completed, it would transport natural gas from the Niger Delta to several cities in the country, as well as other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
He also blamed poor funding of ICRC, inconsistent government policies, the dearth of institutional capacity, ineffective utilisation of World Bank funding, and the delay in passing many of the reform bills approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) into law, as parts of the challenges that have impeded PPP arrangements in the country, and called on the National Assembly to strengthen the ICRC Act.