The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) says it has established four subsidiaries to help in the execution of strategies in the five sectors identified for infrastructure investment in the country. The Chief Executive Officer of NSIA, Mr Uche Orji, said this while briefing newsmen on investment plans of the authority in Abuja. Orji listed the sectors marked for the infrastructure investment as agriculture, real estate, motorways, power and healthcare.
According to him, the subsidiaries that have already been incorporated are NSIA Motorways Company Ltd, NSIA Power Investment Company Ltd, NSIA Health Care Investment Company Ltd and NSIA Real Estate Investment Company Ltd. He said that the NSIA had allocated the sum of 100 million dollars (about N16.2 bn) to the power sector and had an agreement with a private equity company to invest 200 per cent of the amount in the sector. Orji said that there were lots of opportunities in the sector, saying that the authorities were looking at power generating companies, distribution companies and opportunities for Greenfield and secondary investors.
“There are a lot of opportunities, but we are not close to announcing any at this stage,’’ he said. Orji also said that NSIA had interest in the power-to-gas funding with the recent 550 million dollars (about N89.1bn) allocated to the programme by the Federal Government. He said that the investment authority had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a firm, AMA-Sinohydro, to collaborate on investment opportunities in hydro-electric power plants, multi-purpose dam, real estate and transportation infrastructure.
On Motorways, he said that the focus of investment would be on the construction of the second Niger Bridge with equities from Julius Berger and other equity partners.
“We are now the lead financing partner in the consortium with responsibility to invest our equity and attract other equity partners and raise debt for this project. We already have soft commitment from potential equity partners and this will be the first federally-tendered Private-Public-Partnership project in motorways in Nigeria. We believe the negotiated construction cost will be bankable in the current structure,’’ he said.
Orji said that concession agreement negotiation on the bridge project had commenced, adding that announcement of a timetable for getting to a “financial close” on the project would be made soon. He expressed hope that with the NSIA equity, Julius Berger’s, “soft commitment from other equity partners and government viability funding”, work on the project would begin in March, 2014. He said that the body had been negotiating for core infrastructure investment on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.
According to him, we have also been on this for over 10 months and hopefully, we can reach an agreement on a bankable structure.
On real estate, the NSIA boss said that investment would be on tools that would accelerate the market. He said that the authorities were negotiating with a state government and the Federal Capital Territory for affordable housing programme.
“Our strategy is to invest ‘via funds’ as well as make direct investments in areas that would help accelerate the agriculture market. We have made an investment into a fund for agriculture finance run by Sahel Capital partners which will work to invest in shared infrastructure for small holder farmers as well as other areas,’’ he said.
