The Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) said it received five bids for the privatization of the Yola Electricity Distribution Company (YEDC) and Afam Electricity Generation Company (Afam Power Plc & Afam Three Fast Power Limited) by prospective core-investors.
The bids were received last Friday – the deadline for the submission of technical and financial proposals for the acquisition of the two firms.
Two firms – Quest Electricity Nigeria Limited and Sandstream Nigeria, submitted proposals to acquire the Yola Disco while DiamondStripes Consortium, Unicorn Power Generation Consortium and Transcorp Power, sought to acquire the Afam Genco.
Sandstream submission was however found to be non-responsive as it failed to include a bank guarantee in line with the requirements in the Requests for Proposal (RfPs). Consequently, the representative of the firm took back the bid.
Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Alex Okoh assured the bidders that the evaluation of their bids would be subjected to the highest level of integrity culminating into the financial bids opening of the successful bidders.
Okoh said the Evaluation Committee would meet immediately to discuss and finalise the scoring criteria before commencing the evaluation process today -Monday, March 18, 2019 and end on Thursday, March 21, 2109.
The Yola Distribution Company was successfully privatised and handed over to the core investor in 2013, but a force majeure was declared in 2015 by the core investor citing insecurity in the North-East region of the country. Following this, the company was duly repossessed by the Federal Government.
The transaction for Afam Power Generation Company, on the other hand, failed to scale through due to the delay in signing the Gas Supply Agreement (GSAA) and the Gas Transportation Agreement (GTA).
As a result, the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) gave approval for a fresh transaction to privatise the two power companies in 2017.
19 firms had indicated interest to acquire the two power plants at the close of the submission of bids for the Expression of Interest (EOIs) on September 26, 2018.
But Okoh has told BusinessDay in 2017 that that the sale of those two power plants would be concluded by mid 2018 for Afam Genco and later same year for Yola Distribution Company, but this did not happen.
He had however, said the government would be a little bit more creative in terms of how it approaches the privatization and that the plan was actually to break the plant into smaller manageable business units, to make it attractive to prospective investors.
The BPE now expects that the successful bidders would be responsible for operating the generation and distribution companies, making the necessary investments to improve the generation and distribution networks and customer service in line with the objectives of the Federal Government of Nigeria set out in the National Electric Power Policy (NEPP).
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