Stakeholders’ engagement threat to privatisation-BPE

Stakeholders’ engagement threat to privatisation-BPE


Managing the vari­ous stakehold­ers is one of the greatest challenges to the reform and privatisation programme of the Federal Government, the Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (|BPE), Mr. Benjamin Ezra Dikki, has said.

Dikki, who identified the various stakeholders in the reform and privatisation pro­gramme as labour unions, players in the sector, prospec­tive investors, consultants/ advisors and those he called ideologues. He maintained that to have a credible and successful transaction, skillful management of the various stakeholders is required.

He noted that the power sector reform and privatisa­tion was globally acclaimed to be the best because of the high degree of transparency, which stakeholders observed and that explained the ab%Cnce of any controversy about the outcomes.

The BPE boss, who made the observation during an in­terview with Voice of Nige­ria (VON) in Abuja, said the management of labour issues in the power sector was more challenging but that President Goodluck Jonathan directed and insisted that every worker of the over 47,913 staff of Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) must re­ceive every kobo of his or her entitlements. “As a result, all the proceeds from the sale of unbundled companies of the defunct state monopoly were expended in the settlement of workers’ entitlements across the country,” he added.

Dikki observed that re­forms in the various sectors of the economy have gener­ated employment as most of the privatised companies like WAPCO, Oando and the banking sector have, through local and international expan­sion, created millions of jobs, emphasising that “privatisa­tion creates jobs.”

He said in the last 16 years, the defunct PHCN could not employ engineers, whereas the new companies in the dis­tribution and generation com­panies have employed 2,022 engineers within a space of one year. The privatization czar added that the transfor­mation agenda of President Jonathan has also started to yield results as five to six automobile companies, in­cluding Nissan, Volkswagen and Hyundai had returned to the country as a result of the investment-friendly industrial revolution policy.

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