37% privatised firms failing – BPE

At least two in five companies privatised by the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) since inception are not performing, the agency has stated.
The agency said it had privatised 142 enterprises since inception in 2004 with 37 per cent of them (52) not performing.
Director-General of the privatisation agency, Alex Okoh, made these known while receiving members of the House of Representatives Committee on Privatisation, led by its chairman, Ahmed Yerima, who were on an oversight visit to the Bureau in Abuja last Thursday.
A statement sent to Premium Times yesterday by the agency said Okoh disclosed that out of the 142 enterprises, 94 have been monitored while the rest have not been monitored because “some were either assets sale or in the first phase of privatisation and as such did not fall within the BPE’s monitoring purview.”
He said out of the privatised enterprises, 63 per cent of them are doing well while the remaining 37 per cent are not performing.
The director-general attributed the poor performances of the non-performing enterprises to the operating business environment in the country in which many private or privatised public enterprises had either closed down or relocated to neighbouring countries.
Out of the 142 privatised enterprises, the Director General said, 63 were through core investor sale, nine through guided liquidation, one through sale to existing shareholders, five through public offer and two, through liquidation.
He added that eight were privatised through private placement, 41 through concession, two through debt/equity swap and 11 through sale of assets.
Breaking down the enterprises by sectors, the director-general said five were in agricultural mechanisation, eight in automobiles, seven in banking and insurance, six in brick making and six in the cement sector.
The others he listed are: 10 in energy construction and services, 12 in hotels and tourism, eight in oil and gas, four in paper and packaging, 19 in solid minerals and mining, seven in steel and aluminium, four in the sugar sector, 26 in marine transport sector, 19 in power and one in telecoms.
The BPE boss informed the lawmakers that the Bureau had commenced a thorough review of the non-performing enterprises to ascertain the issues affecting their non- performance.
Earlier, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Privatisation, Mr. Yerima, said that the committee was at the bureau to have accurate information on its activities and to ascertain its compliance with the provisions of the 2017 Appropriation Act in line with the resolution of the House that all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) complied with the Act.

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