Managing post-privatisation challenges: a review of Nigeria’s electricity sector

ABSTRACT

Often privatisation is perceived as a magic wand that would eliminate the ineffectiveness in service provisioning. But usually, this does not happen, especially in most economically, politically, and administratively weak countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The objective of this study is to interrogate the policy options towards managing post-privatisation challenges. Using historical data sourced from official documents, media clips, extant literature and other documentary sources, the paper examines the post-privatisation collaboration efforts of the Nigerian government to ensure the success of the privatisation of the electricity infrastructure. The author argues that privatisation should not be seen as a one-off conclusive activity in which the government divests from a privatised entity and at best merely regulates, but rather should be perceived as a continuous process of collaboration with the private sector through interventionist role of the government to improve and sustain service delivery to the citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-privatisation challenges
• third-party government
• collaboration
• electricity sector
• Nigeria

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their contributions, which have shaped the final perspective in this paper. All errors are however personally owned up.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Okechukwu Marcellus Ikeanyibe (PhD) is a Professor (Public Administration) at the Department of Public Administration and Local Government, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is a Visiting Research Fellow of the School of Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary and an Academic Researcher of the University of Electronic Science and Technology, China (UESTC). Okechukwu was one of the winners of the 2018 edition of the University of Nigeria Excellent Performance Award for Academic Staff. The author has over 70 high-ranking publications to his credit, including five books (three co-edited) and many articles in Scopus and Clarivate Analytics indexed journals.