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We all agree that Lagosians are among the most enterprising, most hardworking and ingenuous people in the world. However, that spirit of enterprise has struggled to stay afloat because of the activities of government, especially in the last 19 years.
As a businessman myself, I understand that for any business to thrive, it must compete on price, quality and ability to supply. Lagos businesses, small, medium or large, all need help to make their products competitive against cheaper imports.
To price competitively, their cost of production would need to be lower than that of the competition. The most obvious area in which sensible, smart and timely government intervention can help is power.
We plan to engage with the existing power providers, with a firm commitment to creating new, smaller, subterranean power grids, based loosely along LGA geographical lines, which will be serviced by dedicated IPPs, in turn covered by state-backed Power Purchase Agreements.
These agreements will include stiff penalties for interruptions from the IPPs, while consumers will enjoy similar legal protection from the discos.
We will start with the six most industrialised LGAs, and parts of Badagry and Eti-Osa, the latter two for the express purpose of CREATING a world-class tourism industry.
We expect, using advanced Horizontal Direct Drilling techniques, to complete these first few mini-grids, as part of a larger Lagos Integrated Regeneration Plan (LIRP), within 18 months. I will discuss the LIRP in more detail later.
With cost of power down, and its quality and reliability at 100% in even these few LGAs, we expect industrial output to show and maintain a significantly steep growth curve from the day the new grids are fired up.
Goods will become cheaper at the factory gate, but other factors will impact upon eventual price to the consumer, and I will explain how we intend to address them for your benefit, in Part 2.
