Nigeria power sector privatisation moves into its monitoring phase
The National Council on Privatisation has approved performance agreements covering Afam Power and Afam III Fast Power, six years after the assets were sold. The Bureau of Public Enterprises can now hold the buyer to the operating targets it committed to, and the transmission company has been separated into two entities.
The National Council on Privatisation has approved the execution of performance agreements covering Afam Power Plc and Afam III Fast Power Limited, the two generating assets sold to the Transcorp consortium in November 2020. The approval followed a memo from the director general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, Ayodeji Ariyo Gbeleyi, at the council’s third meeting, held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.
A performance agreement records what a buyer has undertaken to do with an asset, usually raising operational capacity to an agreed level inside an agreed period. It is a standard part of the post-acquisition process in Nigerian power privatisations, and signing it gives the state something specific to measure against.
Gbeleyi said the bureau can now begin the mandatory post-privatisation monitoring of the investor’s obligations.
Among the changes the council recorded for 2025 was the separation of the Transmission Company of Nigeria into two entities, the Nigerian Independent System Operator and a transmission service provider, dividing the running of the system from the ownership and maintenance of the lines. That split is the standard structure in liberalised electricity markets and a precondition for competitive trading.
The council’s chairman, the Vice President, has set it a wider brief, proposing that it turn to Nigeria’s underused public assets, from dormant real estate to intellectual property that has never been commercialised. “We replace bureaucratic bottlenecks with commercial agility, relieve government of the costly burden of subsidising inefficient state-owned enterprises, and attract vital investment,” he told the meeting.
