N398trn infrastructure plan awaits Buhari

As Nigeria transits to a new government this Friday, a major concern is the fate of the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), a document that has projected N398.1 trillion ($2 trillion) for infrastructure development over 30 years.The National Planning Commission (NPC) in 2012 initiated the idea of drawing up a long-term infrastructure development plan […]

As Nigeria transits to a new government this Friday, a major concern is the fate of the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIIMP), a document that has projected N398.1 trillion ($2 trillion) for infrastructure development over 30 years.
The National Planning Commission (NPC) in 2012 initiated the idea of drawing up a long-term infrastructure development plan for the nation’s sustainable economic growth and development.
The NIIMP is “set to liberate the economy from the shackles of debilitating infrastructure bottleneck, and place it on a solid growth path. It provides the framework that will guide interventions, investments, as well as budgetary allocations to the sector in the next 30 years,” Minister of National Planning Dr. Abubakar Sulaiman said while presenting the plan.
The new infrastructural growth roadmap set by NIIMP indicates that Nigeria has to increase investments in infrastructure from the current N1.83 trillion (about $ 10 billion) annually to N9.34 trillion (about $51 billion) by 2018.
The initial five-year operational period of the plan has an investment portfolio of N26.9 trillion ($166.1billion) in order to deliver priority infrastructure projects across the country.
The NIIMP document seen by Daily Trust indicates that the investments are expected to average to N6.57 trillion ($33 billion) annually, being 5.4 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the five-year period running from 2014 to 2019.
The NIIMP document which has 2043 as its terminal date, provides that in the first five years of the plan, investments in energy, transport, social infrastructure and housing be given priority due to their current relative level of under-investment.
An executive summary of the NIIMP document indicates that the investments will grow over the next five years at an annual growth rate of 50 percent for energy, 39 percent for transport, 32 percent for social infrastructure and 23 percent for housing.
The growth path had expected Nigeria to raise its investments in infrastructure to N10.17 trillion ($51.1 billion) annually as from 2014.
Unfortunately, one indication that the NIIMP may have been dead on arrival is the fact that long after the plan was to have taken off, implementation is yet to start.
NIIMP was approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on Sept. 3rd 2014 for implementation, and the approval was to be followed by a presidential launch.
“The approval of NEC and FEC has made NIIMP a policy document of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for a coordinated and accelerated infrastructure development that will guide all tiers of government in infrastructure planning and development,” Dr. Sulaiman said during a meeting of stakeholders of economic planning across 36 states of the federation held in his office late last year.
The presidential launch which is a cardinal requirement for the takeoff of the plan, initially slated for December last year and later postponed to January this year seems to have been jettisoned for no disclosed reason.
There are concerns that the NIIMP may go down the drain just like other previous national plans in the history of Nigeria. Over the years, since Nigeria gained independence, several economic plans have been drafted by previous administrations to tackle the nation’s infrastructure deficit.
Nigeria had had the First National Plan, Second National Plan, NEEDS, 7-point Agenda of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, Vision 20:2020, the current Transformational Agenda that comes to a halt on May 29 and the new NIIMP which fate remains unknown. Efforts to tackle Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit must go beyond paper work.
It could be recalled that the Country Director of African Development Bank in Nigeria, Dr. Ousmane Dore, had during the 2014 Nigerian Economic Society Public Lecture said that African economic transformation is constrained by infrastructure inadequacy, adding that the situation holds economic growth by two percent yearly while reducing private sector productivity by up to 40 percent.
Dore said apart from internet access, Africa falls “far below” its peers in electricity generation, electricity access, road density, paved roads, fixed telephone access, mobile telephone access and improved water.
To solve this problem, NIIMP provides that investments of $800 billion, $300 billion, $30 billion, $25 billion, $30 billion and $1.5 billion to be made in road, urban transport, rail, aviation, seaports and inland waterways respectively over 30 years.
Housing, oil and gas, power, and agriculture are to gulp $300 billion, $350 billion, $550 billion and $70 billion respectively over the same period.
NIIMP presents a platform for public and private sector constructive engagement and donor support for boosting development as the financing plan is meant to be implemented through Public Private Partnership (PPP).
Engineers’ role
The Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE) conference coming up in Akure, Ondo State this year will discuss the master plan.