The Country Director for Nigeria, World Bank, Ms. Marie-Francoise Marie-Nelly, disclosed this in an interview with our correspondent on the sideline of the ongoing country performance reviews.
Marie-Nelly also said the bank, which is seeking approval for projects worth $1.5bn in the country, planned to rehabilitate four dams in the country to help boost agricultural production through irrigation.
She said, "Everybody understands that power is critical to the economy. We are not only providing money for investment, we are also helping the government to mobilize private sector financing.
"We have commitment to support the production of 2,000 megawatts in the next two years with private sector financing through independent power producers. This is the second area of our engagement.
"We hope that in the next four years, we would have contributed to better energy; we would have helped to stabilize energy because you cannot transform overnight. You need to transform the institutions; we need to improve generation; we need to improve the transmission; we need to improve the distribution.
"Although everybody is impatient, it takes four to five years to have a significant improvement."
The World Bank official added, "Nigeria has a lot of water and rivers, yet irrigation mechanism is about one per cent of the entire arable land. At the same time, Nigeria had in the past built a lot of dams, 20 to 50 dams, of which only about one third are working.
"So, what we are proposing is to identify three or four priority dams with a large production area that we will help to rehabilitate so that we can support the government's transformation agenda. The dams are all there but the irrigation system is not there."
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