The Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Alex Okoh has commended Skyway Aviation Handling Company Limited (SAHCOL) when he visited the company at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos as part of the bureau’s post privatisation monitoring programme.
Okoh, who was accompanied on the visit by the BPE Director of Capital Market, Baba Mohammed, was received by the Managing Director of SAHCOL, Rizwan Kadri, and the Management staff at the company’s headquarters on Wednesday.
He explained that the purpose of the visit was to commend SAHCOL for a job well done so far, and to seek whether it is ripe to give SAHCOL a clean bill of health, in order to present a discharge certificate to the company, so as to be completely off the monitoring of BPE.
The Director-General, revealed that SAHCOL was one of their success stories so far, and hence would want to understand the dynamics behind the success, and perhaps be able to replicate it in BPE’s future privatisation and transactions.
“Essentially we want you to know that we are quite pleased with the progress SAHCOL has made so far, which goes to justify the principles of privatisation,” Okoh said.
He explained that the federal government to show its support for privatisation, enacted a law in 1999, known as the Public Enterprise Act, to identify certain government enterprises which needed to be privatised and handed over to the private sector.
This, according to him, was to ensure that the efficiency of the services rendered by these enterprises are improved upon, and also to stop the bleeding in terms of the pressure that these enterprise that were not fully efficient were putting on the treasury of the federation.
In addition, he said the transaction method observed and chosen for the privatisation of SAHCOL was full privatisation, so as to heighten the level of services rendered, given the international benchmark, but in some of the other enterprise sold, government has held some stake essentially in order to direct the strategic services that are provided to the public space.
Reinforcing the essence of his visit to SAHCOL, Okoh emphasised that what BPE tried to do, especially for the fully privatised companies like SAHCOL “is to keep monitoring the performances of the level of services rendered, given the international best practices that have to be met, to ensure that they meet the critical objectives of privatisation in the first place.â€
