Critical Success Factors (CSF) in the Implementation of Public Infrastructure Projects under Nigeria’s PPP Legal Framework

The paper examines the challenges in some of the existing PPP projects in Nigeria as well as reviews the doctrinal and empirical studies on the identification of Critical Success Factors (CSF) to determine the factors and sub-factors that ensure the success of any public infrastructure project under the existing legal framework on Public Private Partnership (PPP) in Nigeria. The study is significant in view of the rate of failure of PPP projects in Nigeria, which resulted in the gory statistics that two out of every five privatized companies have failed and that over 70 percent of concessions are either stalled, abandoned, cancelled or are in litigation. Using the Systematic Review of legal research, the paper identified forty CSFs including legislature support and Insecurity as critical to PPP success in Nigeria. It observed that the existing legal framework did not provide for CSFs and that neither the public authorities nor private entities pay heed to any form of CSF categorization in PPP implementation. It thereafter recommended, inter alia, that the National policy should be amended to include a mechanism that identifies and reviews, from time to time, the forty factors identified by the paper as critical to the successful development, procurement and implementation of PPP projects in Nigeria.