Atiku condemns incessant national grid collapse, proposes solution

Former Vice-President and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has condemned the incessant collapse of the national grid resulting in blackout in the country.

The national grid had, on Wednesday, suffered another system collapse.

Atiku, however, proposed innovative financing of infrastructure that would involve the facilitation of a review of the financial and regulatory environment to promote private investment in the power sector as the solution to the system collapse of the national grid.

The former Vice-President made this known via a string of tweets on his verified Twitter handle on Wednesday.

He said: “I am reliably informed that there was a total National Grid Collapse at precisely 12:23pm today. This is one collapse too many. It is the 6th time this is happening this year alone.

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“Due to the priority that I place on the power sector upon which the successes of other sectors are hinged, I am proposing innovative financing of infrastructure that will involve the facilitation of a review of the financial, legal, and regulatory environment to promote private investment in power, among other sectors.

“I’ll promote the incentivisation, with tax breaks, a consortium of private sector institutions to establish an Infrastructure Debt Fund (IDF) to primarily mobilise domestic and international private resources for the financing and delivery of large infrastructure projects across all the sectors of the economy.

“The IDF will have an initial investment capacity of approximately US$20 billion. In addition, I’ll cause the creation of an Infrastructure Development Credit Guarantee Agency to complement the operation of the IDF by de-risking investments in infrastructure to build investor confidence in taking risks and investing capital,” Atiku stated.

The Star