The recent laudation of the Abia State government by Geometric Power for its efforts to ensure reliable power supply in its utility’s coverage area brings to the fore a critical element in Nigeria’s economic development, public-private partnership (PPP), which has become regrettably a desideratum. While the PPP is officially a development strategy adopted by every government in the country, the reality tells a different story.
With the publication in 2014 of the book titled “Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy”, Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading global thinkers, shocked the world by revealing that a Nigerian state governor compelled a soya milk-producing company owned by a German named Robert and his Nigerian wife to shut down for refusing to offer huge bribes to him. Ironically, it was the couple that brought the governor into the picture by reporting the state police commissioner to him for demanding huge bribes from the nascent firm. Also ironic is that it was the couple that brought the police commissioner into the picture by reporting the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) to him for demanding unaffordable bribes from a company yet to find its feet. The DPO was brought into the matter because local government officials where the business was located were involved in repeated extortion. The DPO demanded higher bribes than the local government officials, and the state police commissioner demanded a higher sleaze than the DPO, and the state governor demanded a much higher amount than the state police commissioner. The company folded up.
Remarks Fukuyama on page 218 of the book which is a deep and wide-ranging reflection on political theory development: “Although this might seem like a typical story about developing world corruption, it raises troubling questions. The willingness of Robert and his wife to establish a business should have led to a win-win situation for everyone: for the soyabean farmer, for the consumers of their products, for the 200 employees of Robert’s company, and, indeed, for the public officials who would have seen long-term tax revenues rise and who might have been rewarded at the next election for having encouraged the creation of so many jobs. .. Once Robert left the country, there was no one from whom they could extract a bribe, no one further tax. The potential win-win became a lose-lose”.
Nigerians who followed the privatisation of the electric power sector in November 2013, for instance, were not surprised at Fukuyama’s disclosure that top Nigerian public officers deliberately destroy businesses, however critical they may be to the economy or society, for purely private gains. We saw how the country’s leadership brazenly refused to uphold the 2004 agreement, amended in 2005, between Geometric Power and the federal government carving out nine of the 17 local government areas [LGAs] in Abia State to form the Aba Ring-fenced Area where Geometric Power would generate electricity and distribute to the area. This was despite the fact that the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) published notices in the media advising prospective investors in the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) that the Aba Ring-fence was not part of the territory up for grabs.
The BPE went a step further by putting in the prospectus for intending investors in the EEDC a document warning that the nine LGAs in and around Aba had been separated from the EEDC territory. Still, top government officials ignored all this for purely personal gains. When President Goodluck Jonathan visited Geometric Power on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, while on a reelection campaign in Abia State, he expressed great surprise at the humongous expenditure on the Aba Independent Power Project totaling almost $800 million. He pledged to resolve the problem because, in his own words, “this is a man-made problem”. The statement turned out, however, to be a mere political promise. He never corrected the gross injustice.
It is, therefore, gratifying to learn of the laudatory letter by the Geometric Power management to the Abia State government for what the company called its authentic partnership with the government. The statement signed by Edise Ekong, the brand and communications manager at Aba Power, the embedded distribution subsidiary of the Geometric Power group, revealed that following a series of outages in the Aba Ring-fence in recent weeks arising from disruptions in the gas supply chain, Governor Alex Otti of Abia State, his commissioner for power and public utilities, Ikechukwu Monday, and the governor’s special adviser on power and public utilities, Katchi Etolue, worked round the clock with the Geometric management and staff to resolve the disruptions. The disruptions are now over.
The governor spoke directly and personally to Heirs Energies, which took over the operatorship of Oil Mining Licence (OML) 17 in Owaza in Ukwa West LGA in Abia State from The Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) when the President Muhammadu Buhari administration declined to renew the licence for Shell, leading to protracted litigation and drying up of investments in the gas facilities for years. This development worsened the condition of the aged gas pipelines built between 50 and 60 years ago. According to the Aba Power communication head, Governor Otti has also been discussing with the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) and the Independent System Operator (ISO) with a view to enabling Geometric Power to receive supplies from the national grid during emergencies. The discussions were fruitful.
True, Otti isn’t the only governor to assist Geometric Power to succeed for the benefit of the Abia people. Every Abia State governor from Orji Uzor Kalu helped enthusiastically. But that of Otti is special. As Geometric Power chairman Bart Nnaji once noted, it would seem that both his firm and Otti are joined at the hip. Otti was an executive director with First Bank when the proposal for financing the Aba Independent Power Project was made to the bank, and, by a twist of fate, he headed an internal committee that looked into the proposal. When he moved to Diamond Bank to become managing director, Otti came to head the financial institution that had from inception been promoting the new privately owned power firm. Years later, he was leading Abia when the Aba Power Project was commissioned on February 26, 2024, by Vice President Kashim Shettima. The power project is a socioeconomic game changer in the state, resulting in historic investment flows into Aba famous for indigenous manufacturing.
The Abia State government is showing the light on how the public and the private sectors can work collaboratively. This is significant. As Aliko Dangote, Africa’s most successful entrepreneur, has stated publicly, some Nigerian government officials work gleefully in cahoots with economic sharks for the killing of tremendous investments like the $20 billion Dangote Refinery in Lagos just for their private benefit.
Nigerian government leaders need to borrow a leaf from the Abia State government and even from Chinese civil servants who, as Edward Tse, has reported in the influential book, “The China Strategy: Harnessing the Power of the World’s fastest-growing Economy”, work effectively, efficiently and enthusiastically to attract huge investments in their places. No matter what many may say against President Donald Trump, no one doubts his eagerness to attract investments to the United States. The Abia State government is on the right trajectory.
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