Poor Electricity, Huge Constraint To Nigeria’s Growth – IMF Official

Director for the African Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mrs Antoinette Sayeh, has said that irregular power supply was a major cause of the setback that Nigeria presently encounters.
Speaking to reporters at the just-concluded Spring Meetings of the World Bank/IMF in Washington, DC, the official also added that electricity is a huge constraint to growth and to the ambitions that many sub-Saharan African countries face to diversify and have structural transformation realised in the immediate future.

“Some countries want it yesterday. It is not just low income countries in the region, but across the board as we see now also South Africa struggling with the electricity problems as well. Nigeria is also very challenged on that account,” she said.
Sayeh pressed further that countries certainly want and have expressed their desire to invest more heavily in infrastructure that permits them to generate and distribute more electricity and power, stressing that for that, they need to both redouble their efforts to create their own fiscal space, make room in their budgets to finance more investments by, of course, doing better on the issue of resource mobilisation, revenue mobilisation, but also better prioritising their expenditures in their budgets and being able to, therefore, have more room to finance infrastructure.
“But, of course, their ability to finance infrastructure is limited. In addition to public sector borrowing for infrastructure purposes, it is a huge need and countries are very interested in increasing their partnerships with the private sector through public-private partnerships to do better in terms of infrastructure financing and innovating with the capacity that private participants can bring to the table,” she added.

Tweet