Acting Director-General, Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, Dr. Ghaji Bello, spoke with IFEANYI ONUBA on issues relating to Public Private Partnership projects in the country
You were recently appointed Acting DG, ICRC, what would you do differently?
For us to be able to make a difference, we must first of all understand quite a number of things. We have to understand who we are, why we were set up, what our mission is, and why government set us up. Once we are very clear on that then we will be able to see whether we have been able to deliver on that.
Primarily, the ICRC was set up by government through an Act of Parliament and the purpose is to fill the gap of the infrastructure deficit, which our country is facing.
Now, the perception of the ICRC outside of the institution is that it has not been able to deliver. And one of the things we need to do differently is to reach out to the outside world so that we can bring to the fore the mandate of the ICRC and how it can deliver on its mission.
So, we have to make the public know that the ICRC is here to serve them and to make a difference in the lives of Nigerians.
How do you hope to achieve this vision?
We want to work closely with the ministries, departments and agencies of government in order to be able to assist them to develop the immediate infrastructure. We are working with the MDAs to assist them to develop projects so that at the end of the day, the roads, hospitals, airports that Nigerians are expecting will begin to come.
There are 12 sectors that we are looking at and we also want to develop the regulations and guidelines and issue out these guidelines as a regulator.
Presently, we have not developed a single guideline for any of this sector of the economy and this is one area we need to strengthen. We need to develop guideline for the power sector, Information and Communication Technology, transportation, and ports concessions. We have a clear idea of what we want to do but PPP projects takes time to deliver. You have to do a lot of work such as the Environmental Impact Analysis; you have to hold stakeholders’ consultation; and you have to do some concession.
When you bring in the private sector to construct road, people are asked to pay tolls for using the road and this sometimes doesn’t go down well with them. Is there anything being done to address this?
I don’t think it is correct to say Nigerians are not too happy to pay tolls. Those people that are plying the Lekki Expressway are happy with the road but they are not happy with the tolls because perhaps they were not consulted.
Stakeholders’ consultation is very important. People will be happy to pay a toll and drive on a road where there are no potholes; that will enable them to reach their destination on time rather than spend five to six hours on a bad road. The PPP is a new concept and because it is new, there are challenges.
ICRC seems to be shy in taking position as a regulator. For instance, the Maevis – FAAN contract in the aviation sector; and the now revoked Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. What is responsible for this?
I wouldn’t say in the past that the ICRC was shy in taking a definite position and I think in respect of all those cases, the position of ICRC was very clear. As a regulator, we are supposed to be an impartial umpire and if you are supposed to be an impartial umpire, it means you are not supposed to align yourself with any of the contending parties. We look at the issues and we proffer solutions to them.
If you recall, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway was there before ICRC. The ICRC board was inaugurated in 2008 and the award of the contract for PPP was done before 2008. So, the issues surrounding that road pre-dated the ICRC and therefore, I don’t think it is an issue that we didn’t want to take a definite position.
Procedures were not followed. There were no traffic studies; no process was followed. Although a contract was awarded for the job, it did not reach financial closure. Nobody wants to put his money and that is why Babalakin was not able to go to the outside world for money to do the road.
In all these, what were the specific roles of ICRC?
Take the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway for example, it pre-dated the ICRC but we did advise that procedures were not followed and I think that is the saving grace for the ICRC. If we were to do it on PPP, there are procedures that would be followed. So unless you follow these procedures, the thing (project) will not fly and I think we have been vindicated because it didn’t fly.
Should a regulator not be firm when a party is not fulfilling its terms of the PPP?
If you go through our Act, you will see that we do not have an enforcement power and that is one of the reasons we have not been able to do our job effectively. But since we don’t have enforcement powers, we have neglected the key functions of developing a regulation. Once the regulation is in place, it will give us the power to enforce. So, if you haven’t developed the regulation, where would we get the power to enforce?
The regulation would have to go through a lot of process and it will be comprehensive enough to spell out the sanctions for failure. So if you have not developed the regulations, you don’t have sanctions. We need to develop the regulations so that we can be a more efficient regulator.
How soon will this regulation be developed?
This is not something we do overnight. But I believe that since we now have a clear idea of where we are headed, we are going to put the machinery in place to be able to develop.
And you know for you to develop the regulation, you have to do an extensive consultation; you have to bring whatever you have developed to the stakeholders to get their inputs, and after that you can now pass it on to the Federal Ministry of Justice to go through and make sure that it is what it is supposed to be. Once they are satisfied with it, you have to pass it onto Mr. President.
The steering committee of the Nigerian infrastructure master plan was recently inaugurated with the ICRC DG as co-chair, what should Nigerians expect from this committee?
In the past, we used to have development plans but all of a sudden, that part of development was truncated, especially with the intervention of the military.
But now, evidence abound that most of the countries that we are trying to copy, especially the developing countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, have all sat down to strategise for short, medium and long term plans.
So if we are able to have this infrastructure master plan, we will be able to develop the country to work systematically and it will also enable us to prioritise our plans. This is why we have abandoned projects. It’s because they were not planned in a coherent manner. What we need is coordination. This will help to attract investment into these sectors.
The commission has in the past four years not published eligible projects for PPP contrary to the provision of Section 2 (4) of the ICRC Act. Why is this so?
We have been pre-occupied in the last four years with activities of trying to set up the framework and map out the way we want to move forward. And at that point in time, it was too early to publish the projects because they were not coordinated. People are happy to do PPP projects but by the time they discover that it is not easy, they back out. But now people are coming and they are buying in; we are working with the MDAs and by March, we should be able to publish whatever we have.