Osinbajo urges PPP stakeholders not to exclude social infrastructure

Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has urged stakeholders in Public-Private Partnership (PPP) not to exclude social infrastructure in their projects.

Osinbajo, who expressed this view while declaring open 2-Day Public-Private Partnership Workshop on Tuesday in Abuja, said that the focus seemed concentrated on economic infrastructure.

The workshop was organised by Global Infrastructure Hub in collaboration with Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), Norton Rose Fulbright and Olaniwun Ajayi.

Osinbajo said PPPs governments evidently lacked the resources to solely finance, build and manage public infrastructure.

According to him, the solution is PPPs as ICRC has since its inauguration, taken over about 55 PPP projects all over the country.

He listed some of the well-known PPP projects to include the Murtala Muhammad Airport 2, Garki Hospital, Kainji/Jebba and Shiroro Hydro Electric Power projects, and about 25 port terminals concessioned to private operators.

“Time was when the better resourced private sector looked to game the public sector in PPPs. Usually such victories are pyrrhic; if they could be so described as victories; one more failed PPP, one more failed project.

“But this new approach where the parties are helped to adopt best practices in drafting and management of PPP contracts is a win-win for everyone.

“The admitted focus of the tools is on economic infrastructure; all of the reports you will read, show that the tools focus on economic infrastructure projects to the exclusion of social infrastructure.

“There is a need for us to discuss this even further, especially because of the increasingly large numbers of public projects that are in the nature of social infrastructure.

“Projects in health, education among others; and their peculiarities would benefit greatly from extending the work of the tools to them,’’ he said.

He commended the Global Infrastructure Hub for developing these tools- the PPP Risk Allocation and PPP Contract Management Tools and for dedicating the workshop to the dissemination of the tools for the sub-region.

Earlier in a goodwill message, Mrs Winifred Oyo-Ita, Head of Civil Service of the Federation (HoS), said it was heart-warming that an international workshop of that kind was being held in Nigeria for the first time.

Represented by Mr James Olusoji Olowoofoyeku, Director Special Duties, in the office of the HoS, Oyo-Ita said that Nigerian projects were being showcased in the infrastructure world.

She however, added that if a country must achieve meaningful infrastructure growth, transparency must be the watchword.

Inaugurated in 2014 by the G20, the Global Infrastructure Hub is an organisation dedicated solely to infrastructure in both developed and emerging markets.