By Paul Nwosu :
It is so upsetting that some of Nigeria’s money men with good conscience who have opted to invest in critical sectors end up getting only frustration and opposition from government agents. What is even more appalling is that these are services and products that government has failed in providing for the people. The cases of Adedeji Adeleke, Aliko Dangote and Prof Barth Nnaji call for genuine concern.
Each time President Bola Tinubu travels on official visit he’s always made it a point of duty to meet with successful Nigerian businessmen and women in the Diaspora or their counterparts in that country soliciting investments in Nigeria. Yet, the Ease of Doing Business climate here hardly shows that we’re sincere about Mr President’s solicitations. If we treat our local Nigerian investors this way, what would be the fate of foreigners? This is perhaps the reason we end up attracting crooked business people who are mainly out to exploit the system while the genuine ones who have been established here for decades are relocating to more business-friendly climes.
Adedeji Adeleke, the Nigerian billionaire businessman and father of Davido, the celebrated Afrobeats singer, has had to fend off multiform challenges in his drive to build a $2 billion power plant.
Adeleke gives the assurance that the 1,250-megawatt (MW) power plant will be the biggest in Nigeria when it starts operation in January 2025. In his words, “I am building, and almost completed in January by the grace of God, my new power plant that will be the biggest power plant in Nigeria. It is a 1,250MW power plant to become operational in January.”
He revealed that he faced many challenges while building the power plant, one of which was a government official who vowed to ensure the project was not completed.
According to Adeleke, “During the course of the design and getting all the permits we ran into some difficulties with government officials. For environmental reasons, our permit was denied. The particular government official that I held a meeting with told me to my face that this project would never see the light of the day. So, I was disappointed and told my Chinese friend that unfortunately we have these difficulties, and it may take a while before we can get this going again. Meanwhile, 1,250MW power plant price tag is about $2 billion, so it’s not small money and a lot of money had already gone into design and preliminaries.”
The determined Adeleke got investment from his Chinese friend and the Bank of China also supported his company. He said that while his business partner from China was worried, he presented the situation before God.
Adeleke said: “So, I continued to pray about it. The following week, on a Wednesday, I got a call from the Ministry of Power that I should come to the Minister’s office. So I went and I was handed over my permit. I didn’t know what happened. All I did was pray about this. So, I asked one of the officials, what exactly happened. Why am I collecting this from this office and not the other office? And the person told me that the particular government official that wanted to block us took ill and was flown to Germany for treatment.”
Even so, there were other challenges faced such as security breaches, including looters stealing valuable copper components from turbine machines.
Adeleke said that as a result of these, the completion of the project was delayed for one year and was estimated to have caused about $5 million loss.
He disclosed that he generates approximately 15 percent of Nigeria’s electricity, stressing: “In Nigeria, I’m in the electricity business. I own power plants. I generate about 15 percent of the electricity needs.”
One then begins to ask: why would any right-thinking Nigerian who also lives in this partial darkness ever contemplate frustrating this man? It can only happen in this country.
The case of Aliko Dangote and his Dangote Refinery is another embarrassing one. He had to tackle so many challenges to get the sprawling refinery, estimated to cost $20billion, going. But just as the refinery was completed, some voodoo economists realised that the facility would become a monopoly in the Nigerian oil refining sector. Before now, oil marketers had been having a field day importing refined products into the country. Meanwhile the NNPC-owned four refineries have been lying prostrate until recently when a wing of the Port Harcourt Refinery was hustled into operation, a claim that has been fiercely queried by experts, stakeholders and civil rights organisations.
As the controversy over monopoly raged, Dangote exasperatedly offered to sell his multibillion-dollar oil refinery to the state-owned energy company, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited. But they shied away. Of course, they know they cannot manage the refinery, even if they find the money to buy it. If they could, their own four refineries would have been up and running well.
Dangote’s dispute with a key equity partner in the oil and gas industry, particularly the regulatory authorities, is part of an attempt to frustrate the refinery from coming into operation.
In the deposition of Dangote, despite Nigeria’s long-standing fuel crisis and the $20 billion refinery’s potential to solve it, there are vested interests unhappy with the project who are willing to undermine its success.
According to Dangote, “Let them (NNPCL) buy me out and run the refinery the best way they can. They have labelled me a monopolist. That’s an incorrect and unfair allegation, but it’s OK. If they buy me out, at least, their so-called monopolist would be out of the way.”
Prof Barth Nnaji has literally seen hell in setting up the Aba-based Geometric Power. Back in 2005, Prof Nnaji’s Geometric Power agreed with the federal government to generate and distribute power in Eastern Nigeria’s industrial hub of Aba. At that time the Power Plant was estimated to cost $800million. It was during the time of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as Nigeria’s President. Alex Otti, the current Governor of Abia State, was then the Executive Director, Commercial Banking at First Bank and later assumed the role of Managing Director and CEO of Diamond Bank, one of the major financiers of the Aba Power project.
It did eventually take almost two decades for Geometric Power to finally get a shot at fulfilling its promise to provide 24-hour power supply to the city of Aba after it turned on the first of its four power-generating turbines for the first time on Sunday, February 25, 2024.
The private greed and government ineptitude that held Geometric Power back for so long would forever cast a dark cloud over private investments in the power sector of this country.
Prof Barth Nnaji, who served Nigeria as Minister of Power, was prevented from keeping the promise of his Geometric Power lighting up Aba after vested interests, crony capitalists, and inept bureaucrats put up barriers to doing business through murky dealings.
Geometric Power was bugged down with political considerations, manipulated bureaucracy, warped regulatory issues and outright denial of gas supply to run the facility, just the same way Dangote Refinery was initially starved of crude oil.
If the government is sincere about attracting investors into the country, like we say, “charity must begin at home.” Those that have been stumbling blocks to these home-boy investors, causing them to lose more money in the process of investing in this country, should be publicly sanctioned.
PAUL NWOSU PhD
E-i-C, AnambraTimes
