Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, has spent over three years in office. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Kachikwu spoke on the challenges facing Nigeria’s oil and gas sector and noted that the sector needed $30 billion to address its infrastructure gaps.
He said: “To a large extent, we have seen problems on the table and this ministry has shown that it can be handled. The challenge is in the area of infrastructure. We have infrastructure deficit in this sector, properly in excess of $30 billion. This is in term of pipelines, depot facilities, refineries, petrochemical complexes, gas distribution plants and others. But the money is there, the investment potentials are there but we need to have policies that show to individuals that when you invest you can get your reward. There is too much of monopoly, in my view, in the national oil companies, which control most of the pipelines because these are government investment handed over to them.”
“But we need to get to time when we can go out say we have numbers of investment that we can push out and put tariff on. We must encourage people to build complimentary infrastructure. Right now, we wait for government even when the infrastructure gets old but government does not have the resources; so, every day the infrastructure is dilapidating. We need to create reward to enable people to come in. We are already working around that; the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) pipeline is private sector-driven, the refineries we are talking about are private sector-driven. We need to create policies that will enable us reach out to the private sector.”
Source: The Guardian