Public officials indiscipline bane of PPP failure-Utomi

Kazeem Ugbodaga

Pat Utomi

Economist, Prof. Pat Utomi says indiscipline among public officials in Nigeria has been the bane of Public-Private Partnership, PPP, failure in the country.

Utomi spoke on Thursday while delivering a lecture at the 6th Annual Public Lecture of the Lagos State Public Service Chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN, titled: “Public Private Partnership: Tool for Economic Growth and Development in Nigeria,” held in Ikeja, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

Utomi said once a particular public officer got into power, he would either scuttle the PPP project initiated by his predecessor under the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) or amend the entire programme.

He said concession programmes in the country had been scuttled because of indiscipline of public officials, while citing the Lagos metro-line project of the Alhaji Lateer Jakande administration which was scuttled by the military administration of the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari.

Biodun Afinowi, MD, Winsor Wood Limited (right) presenting award to an ICAN member

Utomi said if that project had been allowed to succeed, it would have changed the landscape of the Lagos megacity and the entire nation.

“Concession is where the person manages the project for a fee because there are capacity problem in managing it by government, there are cultural problem in managing from the public sector side; the tragedy of the common man that what belongs to all belongs to none can be a challenge to the public sector in doing something, but BOT, where the capital comes from the private sector to build and after some years, transfer to government is key.

“The person builds, operates and transfers to the government after some understanding has been reached. We need more education of the people to understand these things and good representatives from the government side are needed.

“The political parties have important role to play, as far as I am concerned, they have failed in their duties to Nigerians, to educate people who joined them on policy direction, on basic discipline for achieving sustainable development and those problems of indiscipline are those things that significantly affect concessioning and the likes because one government comes and want to reverse what the other governor has done. The bottom line is indiscipline of public officials to the growth of PPP has plunged us into this mess,” he said.

Utomi challenged the nation’s leadership to urgently embrace PPP for the interest and development of the country as government alone could not provide the needed resources to meet the demand of the people.

Special Adviser to the Lagos State Governor on Overseas Affairs and Investment, Prof. Ademola Abass said since government did not have enough resources to provide everything for the populace, PPP had become the way out.

“Does government have resources to drive PPP? Lagos is branded a mega city; on record, Lagos has the highest rate of rural-urban migration in the world, what it implies is that we need more resources. To respond to this we need energy, better roads etc, Lagos is 70 percent water and we rely on land transportation, which is not enough. Lagos alone cannot drive it, we need PPP.

Abass stated that the private and public sector must partner to deliver the goods to the populace as government was constraint by resources to meet the entire needs of the people.

ICAN Chairman, Lagos State Chapter, Mrs. Oyeyemi Ayola said the body decided to organize the lecture on PPP because it had realized that complete reliance on government to provide everything had been detrimental to the growth and development of the nation.

According to her, in the face of dwindling government resources, PPP thus became the key initiative to driving the economy of the nation.