The development of Infrastructure in Africa requires an annual investment of 93 billion dollars by the public and private sectors, a senior advisor on African economic development has said.
Oby Ezekwesili, a former Mininster of Education, stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday.
“What we see is that the public sector alone cannot solve the investment need for Africa’s critical infrastructure. So, whether Africa likes it or not, it must combine the resources of government and that of the private sector.
“Africa needs to invest about 93 billion dollars annually in order to build up the infrastructure that it requires for its development.
“If African countries have so much as improved the quality of infrastructure across every country to the standard of what we have in Mauritius, it will improve economic growth by a digit of two points.
“Now that is significant. It tells you that infrastructure development is really the next of the critical things that the continent will need to do in addition to the first thing, which is a focus on improvement of healthcare and education.’’
She explained that private sector investment in infrastructure required a more complex pattern than what is expected in other areas of investment.
According to her, investment in infrastructure requires the existence of certain regulatory systems and frameworks and also efficient and effective capacity to execute.
She said: “There is also the problem of being able to guarantee the investment that will not have too many challenges.
“An investment that won’t be static in terms of changes and variations in the understanding on the basis of which the investment took off initially.’’
Ezekwesili, who is the Senior Economic Advisor, Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative, added that apart from achieving the productive capacity of the individual African through improved healthcare and education, infrastructure investment was critical to the continent.
She stated that the ideas on how to develop infrastructure, which development agencies such as the African Finance Corporation had come up with in the last 10 decades, shows “some light in the tunnel’’ for Africans.
“ What we need to do is to push the frontiers even more so that ultimately, we would have the kind of resources that we need mobilised within the continent and outside to enable us to solve the problem.
“Policies, institutions, quality of our investment approaches, our choices of investment, our sequence of investment, our priority on investment can make all the difference.
On the Federal Government’s focus on infrastructural development, Ezekwesili explained that development is an integrated process.
According to her, what matters is for a government to understand the barriers to its growth.
“If the most significant underlining barrier is your human capital, then you need to make sure that you prioritise your human capital. And sequence it in a way that closely linked to it is to remove the barrier in the most important sector that would enable growth to happen.
“So your strength, your weaknesses, supported through evidence that you have generated through studies and analysis can help you choose your priorities over a period of time.
“It is about what you do with the time sequencing, it is about what you do to interconnect one activity to the other that is how we generate it.
“The discipline of using evidence to determine your choices of priority and investment is what we lack on the continent; we prefer the politics more than the focus on the discipline of being guided by empirical evidence,’’ she said.
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