Nigeria seeks $5.2 billion from World Bank for electricity
International | 9 May 2017, 10:03am
Lagos - Nigeria is seeking $5.2 billion from the World Bank to
expand electricity generation and help the economy recover from its first
contraction in 25 years.
The bank’s private-sector lending arm, the International
Finance Corporation, may invest about $1.3 billion in power projects and
electricity distribution companies. Its political-risk insurer, the
Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, could provide equity and debt of $1.4
billion for gas and solar power programs, according to Power, Works and Housing
Minister Babatunde Fashola.
That’s in addition to loans of $2.5 billion Nigeria is
seeking from the lender to help improve the distribution of power, expand
transmission-capacity and increase access to electricity in rural areas,
Fashola, 53, said.
“Disbursements with the World Bank are being worked out to
start from around June, July this year,” Fashola said in an interview from his
office in the capital, Abuja on May 4. Nigeria is asking the lender to bring
forward the timetables “because next year we want to see results,” he said.
Africa’s most populous nation produces about 4,000 megawatts
of power compared with a average peak generation of about 35,000 megawatts in
South Africa, with a population that’s less than a third of the size of
Nigeria’s 180 million people.
The lack of supply increases production costs for many
businesses forced to provide their own electricity, mostly using diesel-run
generators. The Nigerian economy shrank 1.5 percent last year, the first
full-year contraction since 1991 because of a fall in oil prices and production
and dollar shortages. Gross domestic product could expand 0.8 percent this year
and 1.9 percent in 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Fashola, who presided over several infrastructure projects
in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos as its governor, was appointed last year
by Buhari to boost the power industry, one of the biggest impediments to growth
in the country.
Power generation and distribution companies are facing
cash-flow difficulties, partly because of foreign-exchange losses, outages due
to technical faults and the theft of electricity by some users, according
to Fashola. In 2016, power distributors paid only 27 percent of the 331 billion
naira ($1 billion) that generating companies invoiced, according to the
National Bureau of Statistics.
Cost-reflective Tariffs
Buhari last month introduced an economic plan that proposes
cost-reflective electricity tariffs, partly to attract investment in the sector
and help the economy recover. Power distributors should fix meters to
measure what they receive from generators and what they sell to users, Fashola
said.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission should
simplify the price-setting formula and work with the central bank to protect
the tariff from exchange-rate fluctuations, he said.
Nigeria’s currency lost about a third of its value against
the greenback after the central bank removed a 197-199 naira to dollar peg in
June. The regulator continued to intervene in the market to keep the naira at about
315 per dollar, which helped to create a thriving black market where foreign
currency cost about 30 percent more.
Electricity tariffs were fixed before the naira was allowed
to devalue. “I don’t think we will have any successful tariff regime
where you have a very fluid exchange rate,” Fashola said. Depreciation of
the naira “wiped out any or most of the gains that the new tariff should
have conferred.”
The national grid can currently only transmit about 6,200
megawatts, with projects in the pipeline to expand that capacity to 10,000
megawatts by 2019, Fashola said.
The World Bank said in a statement last month Nigeria’s
power sector is characterized by poor service and lack of liquidity which
causes macroeconomic imbalances and a binding constraint to economic recovery.
The lender will support the government’s power-sector recovery plan,
according to the statement.
No comments:
Post a Comment