Tony Odiadi BEAUTIFUL ! ‘Legislation on national integrated infrastructure master plan, a necessity’ • Tuesday, 28 October 2014 00:00 • Written by EDITOR • Category: Law President Goodluck Jonathan recently adopted the report submitted by the National Integrated Infrastructural Master-plan committee. The committee was saddled with the responsibility of developing a framework for the acceleration of infrastructural development of the country within a specified time. Mr. Tony Odiadi, one of the outstanding Lagos lawyers who participated in the project and coordinated the law and regulatory technical working group in this interview with Joseph Onyekwere points out the goals of the project and said the report desires legislation. The president has just approved the national infrastructural integrated master plan. In your view what does it portend in view of the work that you have done in it? All of us who where in that Programme are really delighted that after the work that we did the federal government has deemed it necessary to accept it and give it the necessary policy backing towards its implementation. It was a major work which was intended to accelerate infrastructure development in Nigeria in terms of increasing the infrastructure in stock, open up linkages and open it up for private sector participation as well as help to accelerate our GDP. I was the coordinator of law and regulatory committee. We had renowned lawyers both outside and inside the country. We also had other experts such as architects, engineers and others. I can tell you that if the plan is followed in the short term, medium term and in the long term, we should be able at the end of 30 years to have caught up completely at the same level as the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and Singapore. That is our target. We will be within the first ten economies in the world. From your work, was it intended to pass through legislation? Yes. In fact my own committee had that mandate. When we started it was obvious that we needed to back it up with legislation. When we were in vision 2020 committee, we did the same thing. That is why we are able to come up with this bill in the National Assembly known as the project continuity implementation Act. It is a bill that is intended to ensure that all projects are continued regardless of the government that comes into power. And then, this particular one, we thought that it needs a bill that would give it the necessary legal backing. We have done the draft of the law. Now that we have got the federal government policy behind it, I think we would be able to sit down and push the legal specifics to support it. What would the bill be known as? The bill is actually going to be known as an act for the implementation of the national integrated infrastructure†master plan, the 30 years roadmap. It supposed to end in 2043. By which time, we must have spent altogether, N485 trillion. By that time, we must have achieved all the sectoral landmarks within specific time lines. What sectors are you supposed to focus on in the short time? We will look at power, energy, agriculture, then vital registration and security. These are the areas of immediate concern and it includes ICT. In the area of power, we felt that the broad based approach will help. We first did what is called infrastructural stock-taking! So through comparative analysis, we then saw which areas we have greater potentials. We discovered that Nigeria is a gas country. Hydro-electric power seems to come close to optimum potentials. So the area we need to stem up is the area of gas. So it would mean that we need some infrastructural support for that, piping up gas to places of need. Where you to create†plants, that would come at great costs. Then you have to unbundle some of the existing ones, so that there would be easy private participation and licensing. Then you integrate it with other things. If you are dealing with gas you have to look at the ones that would go into consumption such as cooking and all that. In the area of power generation, you have to set some targets. We needed to do clusters - areas of industrial belts, areas of domestic consumptions, and so on. You need to do the statistics of all of it and know the target within first one, two, three to five years. Those are what we have within the short-term plan. Within the ones, you have mentioned, which one do you consider key sector apart from power? We have power, road and rail transportation. We have vital registration and security. The world is going global; citizenship is also going with a lot of data. And with data, citizensí security follows. We need to keep track of our citizens in terms of birth, death, immigrations such as inflow of citizens from other countries and all that. From vital registration, we have security, which is tagged under the same technical working group. You take an inventory of all the security agencies in terms of their equipment and infrastructural needs. Some of the sectors you mentioned are not in the concurrent legislative list. How do you consider the role of the State governments in the project? You will in fact be surprise that one of the thematic groups dealt with state infrastructure. In our own group - the law and regulatory, we took an assemblage of all the key issues because none of these things would work without some legislations or some legal frameworks. Some of them have guidelines for implementation such as the national electric reform act which dealt with the things I was telling you about power distribution, ownership, investment and all that. So, we took these legislations and subjected them to certain tests. We looked at them from the angles of constitutionality, obsolescence, conflict as well as the law such that investors feel safe. These are the parameters we used to assess. So we looked at the issues to find out if such laws are the type the state governments can participate at without any hindrance. In fact in the railway, we recommended that the railway act should be amended so that any state that has the capacity and funds to go into railway transportation should do that. So we had ensured that the laws are such that are investor friendly. We had vision 2020, which you were a member of and now we have this 30 years integrated infrastructural masterplan. How do you marry both programmes together? Vision 2020 as the name implies was a visioning exercise that sought to give Nigeria the necessary considerations in terms of those things that would help the country grow and become one of the 20 leading economies in the world. Within the vision 2020 was also the implementation plan - short term, medium term and the long term. In fact, the short term of vision 2020 has already come towards the end. They are now waiting for the long term. And I can tell you that some of the outcomes of the recent rebased economy show that our economy is growing. It might not have grown at the rate that we expect it, but in Africa now, we are the leading economy in terms of GDP. So, the key thing is that having gone very far with vision 2020, this group is now challenged into focusing on infrastructure. The problem we have is that most advance economies, their infrastructure is normally 70 percent of the GDP, but in Nigeria, our own GDP is just within 30, 37 percent. And that shortfall is†part of the things that are telling on our economic growth. So what do we do to enlarge our infrastructural stock? That is the reason for the national integrated infrastructural master plan. What do you do in order to accelerate your infrastructural growth, enlarge it and meet the standard measure of 70 percent. Vision 2020 has moved us to a point. Now we need to move from that point by focusing on infrastructure. And it’s important. That is why it is taking a period of 30 years so we can tinker with it, learn from it as we grow and perfect it. Do you believe that thing as noble as master plan will be realizable considering the level of corruption in this country? It would be realizable because there is lots of value change. Some of honest things were considered in terms of whether we really follow our budgets. Does our budgeting process allow us to optimize the value? How does corruption take away part of our resources? Some of these things are the things that came into consideration in drawing up this plan and we were able to say that a lot of the corruption complains occurred because they were no institutional check and balances. We didn’t have transparency as much because we didn’t have any punitive measures for those who are caught. Implementation, monitoring and policing which has come in are there for checks. So let’s be optimistic a bit. We believe that once we start, there will be corruption here and there but it would not be a major thing. We will still achieve our aim. You coordinated the law and regulatory technical working group. Beside the bill you said is likely to come out with the committee what other thing did you do? We considered the issue of the regulatory agencies that must superintendent some of these activities. In the road infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, health, education and so on, there would be regulatory agencies and framework that would ensure that targets are met; that there are strict compliance and that the laws are obeyed and that the timelines are met. For example, the issue of power, there is unbundling going on and we felt that the law itself needed to be tinkered with in some places so that it would open itself more to enforcements. It has to do with the issue of the confidence people have in coming to invest in Nigeria. Judgments! How are they enforced? Contracts! How are they followed? A foreigner coming from an environment where contracts are sacrosanct, how are we going to assure them within our own environment that if they enter into contract, the contract will remain? That the terms of the contract would be followed, that if there is violation of the contract, he will not spent eternity in court before getting judgment or some kind of recompense. All of those things were looked at. That is why we come up with the issue of special arbitration courts to deal with such issues when the master plan begins to roll on. So we were looking at the regulatory framework that would drive the process - those that can be called the enablers. If you don’t have the regulatory regime in place, some of these things will not be able to take off. ngrguardiannews/features/law/184529-legislation-on-national-integrated-infrastructure-master-plan-a-necessity
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 09:02:17 +0000
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