Babatunde Raji Fashola is the most powerful minister in President Mohammadu Buhari’s cabinet. Buhari has handed the immediate past governor of Lagos State the challenging task of rehabilitating Nigeria’s decaying infrastructure. Fashola’s assignment is so daunting that the success of Buhari’s administration revolves around his ministry. If Fashola fails, Buhari automatically fails.
If he replicates his astounding success in Lagos at the federal level, Nigeria would hit the waves as one sleeping giant wakening from deep slumber. His ministry is in the first place an unwieldy amalgam of distressed sectors that have foisted on Nigeria the toga of Africa’s largest economy with the infrastructure of Burkina Faso. Fashola presides over the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing; three key areas that make Nigeria look like a primitive economy. The country’s road network is appallingly low and debilitating when compared with developed countries with smaller economies.
The few roads are in very bad shape because almost all modes of land transportation are concentrated on the roads. In the power sector, Nigeria generates 4, 000megawatts (mw) of electricity for a population of 170 million. South Africa, a smaller economy, generates 40, 000mw for a population of 50 million. Erratic power supply is responsible for Nigeria’s economic backwardness and alarmingly high unemployment rate.
The significant improvement in power supply that heralded the emergence of Buhari’s administration has fizzled out. Now that the fear of Buhari’s body language has given way to the second coming of prolonged darkness, Fashola has to initiate policies that would ensure uninhibited generation, transmission and distribution of power. The privatization of the power sector by the Jonathan administration handed the generation and distribution arms of the industry to cash-strapped political cronies.
The distribution companies are in advanced stage of financial asphyxiation and are now looking up to consumers to ease their endemic cash flow problems. They have demanded outrageous tariff hikes from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and have squeezed a 40 per cent hike from a regulator that is willing to protect operators with the blood of consumers. Fashola has to compel the Discos to invest in their business, widen their clientele and enjoy the benefit of economy of scale. Sam Amadi, the out-going chairman of NERC was appointed by an administration that sold the power sector to its cronies. Amadi has been trudging along as someone paid to slaughter consumers on the altar of the operators.
Fashola should replace him with an unbiased umpire who would protect both the operators and consumers. After five years of service with NERC, Amadi and his commissioners have allocated to themselves the sum of N2.3 billion as severance pay. Amadi would go home with N400 million while the commissioners would rake in N380 million each. Their criminal intents must be stopped to avoid setting a dangerous precedent. They do not deserve such largesse. Fashola should halt the tariff hike hurriedly approved by Amadi. The scheme should be reviewed by an unbiased umpire.
In the housing sector, Nigeria is battling a deficit of 16 million housing units with practically no functional mortgage system. Banks lack the capacity to fill the yawning housing deficit with loans to prospective builders because they lack long-term funds. Endemic corruption had over the years, truncated government’s efforts at filling the housing deficit. When government builds for the poor, the rich buy them at give-away prices and rent them to those the houses were originally built for. Even with Buhari’s planned campaign against corruption, the idea of government filling the yawning housing deficit by building for the populace is no longer fashionable.
The funds are not there in the first place. Oil price has dropped by 60 per cent and may remain so for two more years. The short way out of the housing problem is for government to provide the infrastructure and the mortgage facility that people can draw from and pay back over a period of 20 years. Government could however build for those bellow poverty line. With the country’s income cut by 60 per cent, few expect Fashola to perform wonders in terms of road construction and maintenance. However, with the right legal framework, a resort to public-private participation could reduce government financial burden on road construction and pave way for the construction of more roads.
With the elimination of the legal loopholes that allowed the operators of Terminal 2 of the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Ikeja to shift the goal post on the handover date at will, public private participation would spread the burden of building new roads evenly. In the works sector, Fashola now has the unique privilege of tackling a problem that he as governor of Lagos State had blamed on dereliction of duty by the federal government. The federal government collects close to N1 trillion annually on import tariffs from Apapa ports in Lagos, but does nothing about the roads. And odd combination of over-weight tankers and container trailers has pounded the Apapa-Oshodi Road into something worse than Britain’s 18th century macadamized road.
Fortunately, for the first time in the history of Lagos State, the minister of works and the governor of Lagos State belong to the same party. Fashola has no option than to fix Apapa road. Fashola is an achiever any day. The only problem he may have this time is that the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing is rather too unwieldy for one man to run.