The Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Mr. Benjamin Ezra Dikki, has estimated that Nigeria requires fresh injection of about $113 billion in six years for the development of three critical sectors of the nation’s economy, namely Oil and Gas, Power and Transport.

He stated this in a paper presented at the Annual General Meeting of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) titled 'Making Nigeria Work – A Dialogue Between the Real Sector and the Reformer'.

He revealed that to modernise the Nigerian transport system, investments of about $33 billion would be required in six years for roads and rails development to undertake rehabilitation and modernisation of the Nigerian railway and the construction of new road networks across the country.

He indicated that in the next six years, Nigeria would require about $18 to $20 billion of investment in the power sector, stressing that the current reforms in the sector has only enabled the private sector to invest in the rehabilitation of existing infrastructure and in new projects.

Dikki noted that in the next six years, Nigeria would require about $60 billion investments in oil and gas to unleash the potentials in the sector.

He said government was not in a position to finance all these investment requirements, thus the need to invite the private sector to participate in investing in the various sectors of oil and gas, roads, railways, inland waterways and so on.

He said: “It is in order to attract these needed private sector investments that government through the transformation agenda is fine tuning policies and legal and regulatory frameworks to give confidence to the private sector to invest,” emphasising that the enactment of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) and Transport Bills midwifed by BPE will be critical.

Without the passage of the bills, he stressed, the country is estimated to be losing, for example, additional revenue of about US$287m in accruals to government from the three production sharing contracts every month the PIB is not passed.

Going down memory lane, Dikki said the BPE has concluded reforms in eight sectors of the economy, namely: Telecommunications, Power, Banking and Finance, Marine, Mining, Industry, Steel, and Oil and Gas, and touching 123 enterprises, including the recently concluded Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)’s successor companies and realising over N564.3 billion in the process.

According to him, the reform of the telecommunications and banking sectors have, so far, remained the most successful in terms of their impact on the nation’s economy, expressing delight that Nigeria’s tele-density has been raised from about 450,000 telephone lines in 2001 to over 134.5 million as at September, 2014.

“Access to telecommunication facilities has greatly improved the ease of doing business and especially; improved ease of communications between business partners, thereby reducing costs; increased the number of employees in the telecom sector (GSM) phone sellers, repairers and recharge card sellers, etc); increased volume of investment in the sector – for example, telecom contribution to Nigeria’s GDP is now 8.53percent, compared to less than 3percent in 2001,” he noted.

•Sourced from Newswatch Times. Photo shows BPE DG, Benjamin Dikki.