By EBUN SESSOU

Funding of infrastructure through budgetary allocation is volatile and can rarely meet crucial infrastructure expenditure requirements in a timely and adequate manner and usually receives a larger brunt fiscal of retrenchment in times of financial crisis.

Mr. Joe Ohiani, Head Legal and Governance Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, ICRC stated this at a 5-day ESQ Project Finance Summit 2012 organised by the Legal Blitz.

In a lead paper titled,   “Governmental Promotion of Infrastructure Development”  Ohiani  noted  that, “ Infrastructure development plays a key role in promoting economic growth through enhancing productivity, reducing poverty, linking people and improving competitiveness.

“Accordingly, it forms the foundation of any development in a country, investment in infrastructure assets such as roads, power, water supply and healthcare facilities raises the quality of life in any society by creating amenities, providing goods and services and contributing to macroeconomic stability”

He said that special emphasis on infrastructure delivery through Public Private Partnership, PPP should be given optimum consideration so as to solve all challenges besieging the financial and execution of project in African and Nigeria in general.

“A recent study of the Federal Government of Nigeria isolated the absence of integrated national planning framework for infrastructure delivery, lack proper project preparation, dearth of capacity in public authorities, inappropriate funding mechanism, faulty project execution framework, and scarcity of long term finance as the key to the suboptimal infrastructure delivery in Nigeria.

“Of the numerous challenges, those of long term finance and inappropriate funding methods posed the most daunting. In aggregate terms, the annual budget, which hitherto provided the funding for infrastructure in Nigeria, has not only proved completely inadequate.

It may indeed be partly responsible for the dismay state of infrastructure in the country. “The drip-feeding of projects by the annual budget, whereby limited funds available through the budget for capital works is spread across a large number of projects with the result that most are abandoned, very few ever completed often at multiples of the original cost and at scandalous extension in the completion time”.