Introduction
It is an established fact that infrastructure is an enabler. It acts as catalyst and is critical to human and economic development and also the general functioning of every modern society. It defines a country’s business competitiveness and also creates jobs. It provides the sub-structure upon which a given society, the super-structure in this context, is built. It could be likened to a “jugular vein” of an existing society. Without it, a society cannot function. A country’s state of public infrastructure can be an indicator of the country’s economic development and growth. Obviously, an efficient and reliable infrastructure is critical to attract the direct foreign investment and expansion of international trade which are so crucial to growth.
This explains why in every nation, provision of infrastructure assets has always remained on the front-burner of governments’ agenda for development and policy. In Nigeria, the three tiers of government have come to appreciate the fact that provision of modern and functional infrastructure plays a vital role in the socio-economic lives of the people. Therefore, raising the bar for service delivery and tackling the lack of infrastructure have been integral components of successive governments’ visions in Nigeria.
Analysing the state of infrastructure in Nigeria presents a spectacle of a crushing lack of infrastructure assets across the nation. This huge deficit in infrastructure is easily observed in the critical sectors of the nation’s economy such as power, transportation, education, housing, water supply and healthcare. In every way, decades of underinvestment and general neglect in the area of maintenance have taken a toll on the country’s public assets.
The Global Competitiveness Report of 2010-2011, using infrastructure as one of the twelve indicators and as a factor very fundamental to a country’s ability to compete, ranked Nigeria 127th overall out of the 139 economies covered and the country receives poor assessments for its decrepit infrastructure which on its own is ranked 135th amongst 139 economies. According to the report, Nigeria’s poor infrastructure is reported to be the most problematic factor influencing trade in Nigeria. The report underscores the poor state of Nigeria’s infrastructure in that in overall quality, Nigeria’s infrastructure is ranked 134th; in the quality of roads, 128th; quality of railroad infrastructure, 104th; quality of transport infrastructure, 107th; to mention few.
The Debt Management Office4 has established the fact that Nigeria’s current infrastructure deficit requires capital investments to the tune of US$100 billion to US$111 billion, and this magnitude of financing required to bridge the country’s infrastructure deficit, currently outstrips the supply of capital available from the public sector.
So, given the scale of the nation’s infrastructure requirements and the ever-widening investment deficit in provision of public assets and service delivery in an environment of budgetary constraints, lack of capacity, general incompetence and endemic corruption, the governments, at all levels in Nigeria, are drawing on private initiatives and capital to tackle the menace of infrastructure deficits and lack of financing. This entails leveraging private sector resources and capacity for provision of infrastructure assets and services to the public through public private partnerships (PPPs) to bridge the widening infrastructure financing gap and open up the country’s vast economic potentials, fast-tracking the development process.
However, it must be noted that, by implication, the legal framework includes the regulatory system, which itself is a subset of the legal framework.
As a run-up to the proposed discussion in this article, I will look at the framework for PPP as a financing technique or model in Nigeria
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