The federal government, over the weekend, said it has concluded plans to unbundle the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC), to split the corporation into three different parts.
This was disclosed by the minister of Transportation, Mu’azu Sambo, at an interactive session after with journalists in Lagos.
According to Sambo, the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has invested heavily in revitalising the moribund rail, therefore, to make it competitive, it has to be unbundled.
“I want to see the Nigerian Railway Corporation that was abandoned revived. Before I came, plans were on to unbundle the agency. You can’t have an agency that it’s owner, regulator and operator at the same time. Sometimes you can’t run it competitively,” Sambo said in a chat with journalists.
He stated further, “Government has invested a lot of money in fixing the rails, both standard and no-standard gauges. We can give out some of the lines to private operators to run and let the system be very competitive. This is my vision for the NRC. I pray that my team joins me in running this vision.”
He noted that a situation where an organisation would act as owner, regulator as well as operator, cannot make for competitive progress, adding that plans were already on ground to unbundle the corporation before he even came on board as minister.
