President Muhammadu Buhari has allegedly ordered the reassessment of privatized power assets in Nigeria based on “new emerging facts” about the privatization process. The reassessment order was purportedly given based on some “mind-boggling” terms reached with new owners on behalf of government.
One of such terms, apparently included a “government’s pledge” to provide a subsidy of N50 billion annually for two years to the investors. The inability to meet up with this term, the new owners have claimed, was partly responsible for the difficulty they faced in accruing revenues. It would also be recalled that the government had, through the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), approved N213 billion intervention funds for the power companies in the last quarter of 2014.
A team of assessors on a fact-finding mission from the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) are currently visiting privatized power assets across the country to look into the books of the companies behind the privatized assets and to give President Buhari an overview of the true state of the privatized power companies.