How corruption and sabotage kill our public-private partnerships

For decades, a magic phrase has been whispered in the halls of power, promised in political manifestos, and presented as the cure for our crumbling infrastructure: Public-Private Partnership (PPP). From power to ports, and roads to railways, the story is the same. The government, claiming a lack of funds, hands over critical national assets to private investors. We are told this model brings efficiency, world-class service, and development without straining the public purse. Yet, what we the people experience is a different reality: darkness after a power ‘privatization’, ports choked by access roads from hell, and highways that are eternally under construction. The question we must ask is not why the PPP model fails, but why Nigeria seems uniquely cursed to fail at it. The answer lies not in boardrooms abroad, but in the entrenched attitude of our own public service and political class, who see every reform not as a national project, but as a threat to their private racket.

Let us be clear: the PPP model is not inherently evil. In climes where the rule of law prevails, it has rebuilt nations. Consider the experience of an investor arriving in Rwanda. From the moment of entry, the system is engineered to welcome capital. The renowned Rwanda Development Board (RDB) is a true one-stop shop; its officials act as concierges for development, shepherding investors through permits, land access, and regulatory hurdles with a celebrated efficiency that has become a national brand. The state sees the investor as a partner in national growth, and its bureaucracy is incentivised to perform accordingly. While Rwanda’s scale and political structure differ from Nigeria’s, its institutional discipline offers lessons that size alone cannot explain away. Now, contrast this with the archetypal arrival of an investor at a major Nigerian airport. The first contact with the state is often not a facilitator, but a security or immigration agent whose posture can range from bureaucratic indifference to a thinly veiled shakedown. The infamous “offence” of not having a complimentary card, or the intrusive, unprofessional questioning sets a tone of hostility, not partnership. This “Day One” experience is a microcosm of the journey ahead: a gauntlet of rent-seeking officials, not a pathway of supportive governance. While Rwanda’s officials are measured on projects facilitated, Nigeria’s too often still operate on a calculus of “opportunities” extracted.

This foundational difference in attitude shapes everything. In Nigeria, the state too often plays the role of a rogue partner, sabotaging the game from within. The most tragic example is our power sector. The 2013 privatisation was a grand PPP-style experiment. Generation and distribution companies were sold to private entities. Yet, from inception, the process was poisoned. Post-privatisation reviews, including Senate probes, confirmed that many of the ‘preferred bidders’ were politically connected consortia that were undercapitalised and failed to meet their investment commitments. They acquired assets they were neither financially nor technically prepared to run. But the deeper sabotage came after the handshake. The government, through its agencies, failed its own duties. The publicly-owned Transmission Company remains a weak, underfunded bottleneck, a structural contradiction in a supposedly liberalised market. Most fatally, the political will to enforce cost-reflective tariffs vanished the moment votes were at stake, creating a market kept on life support by over N3 trillion in accumulated shortfalls and liabilities, as detailed in NERC reports. The result? A zombie sector: private in name, but crippled by public policy, leaving citizens paying more for darkness. The private partners are blamed, but they operate in a system designed by the state to fail.

This pattern of asymmetric sabotage is replicated elsewhere. Take the ports concession of 2006, often hailed a success. Private operators did bring cranes, efficiency, and reduced waiting times inside the terminals. But what use is a swift terminal when the access roads in Apapa are an apocalyptic parking lot? The government concessioned the lucrative parts but abandoned its duty to provide the connecting infrastructure and streamline the plague of regulatory agencies that turn our ports into a bazaar of bribery. The private efficiency is strangled by public sector failure, a deliberate imbalance where gains are privatised and chaos is socialised. The same script is written for our roads. The idea is sound: a contractor builds a Lagos-Ibadan expressway, maintains it, collects tolls, and hands it back after years. But in our version, the ‘carefully selected’ contractor is a political ally who then fails to perform, leading to decades of litigation and skeletal roads. And when the conversation turns to tolls—the legitimate lifeblood of such a project—our leaders recoil. They fear the public’s wrath, a wrath born of a justifiable distrust that any money collected will be accounted for. The public service, from the top bureaucrat to the roadside official, often views these PPP projects with hostility, not as a national revival, but as a raid on their patronage network. A new toll road means transparent electronic collections, robbing countless hands that feed off the old, dilapidated system. A private port terminal means accountable processes, undermining the lucrative ‘touting’ and ‘clearing’ syndicates protected from within.

Herein lies the core of the rot: the Nigerian state, in many sectors, is structured less as a development engine and more as a corruption-enabling system. PPPs threaten this machine. They introduce contracts, performance metrics, and, ideally, transparency. They are a foreign antibody in a system whose immune response—a mix of political interference, bureaucratic sabotage, and regulatory capture—is violently triggered to reject them. The model demands strong institutions to regulate, but we have weak institutions captured by interests. It demands sanctity of contract, but we have a culture of impunity and renegotiation for the connected. It demands political courage, but we have leadership driven by short-term gain and electoral calculus. Equally trapped is a citizenry so battered by dysfunction that sustained oversight becomes a luxury rather than a habit. In Nigeria today, the roads are so bad generally that people don’t have the comfort of being informed about the cost of projects and under what contractual agreement exists between government and the contractors. We have a jaundiced system.

Our fundamental error is that of a sick patient obsessed with cures while ignoring the symptoms. We clamour for new roads, new power plants, new ports—the spectacular “cures” announced with fanfare. Yet, we wilfully ignore the fatal symptoms: the tumour of corruption in contract awards, the high fever of opacity that hides costs and agreements from the public, and the crippling weakness in our institutional bones that cannot oversee or maintain anything. The sickness is not a lack of models or money, but a pathological disregard for process, accountability, and the public’s right to know. How can a road be fixed if the contract that awarded it is a state secret? How can power improve if the tariff calculation is a political toy?

So, what is the remedy? First, we must kill the illusion that PPP is a shortcut. It is a harder, more disciplined path. We must, as a nation, demand and build the pre-conditions for success. This requires a PPP Act with teeth, mandating a level of public disclosure that would make the 1983 Thai public gazette of bidders our new normal. It requires legally enforced transparency portals where every concession agreement, every financial model, and every performance report is published for public scrutiny—not as a favour, but as a right. It demands that our civil service be retooled and incentivised to become deal-makers and regulators in the public interest, not deal-breakers in private interest. Most critically, it requires exemplary punishment for sabotage, whether by a private concessionaire who fails to invest or a public official who unlawfully interferes.

The examples are before us. They show it is possible. Nigeria is not cursed; it is a choice. We have chosen harassment over hospitality at our gates, secrecy over sunlight in our deals, patronage over performance, and impunity over integrity. Until we, the people, demand a different choice—one where treating the symptoms of governance (transparency, accountability, merit) becomes the non-negotiable prerequisite for any “cure”—the cycle will continue. The real partnership we need is not between the public and private sectors, but between a reformed state and its empowered citizens. That is the only foundation upon which true development can be built. We must stop chasing the mirage of the cure and finally commit to the hard work of healing the patient.

Hussaini,mni wrote from Jos

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