Foreign investors stand ready to pump billions of dollars into Nigeria’s dilapidated power sector if the government can sort out the regulatory framework, a leading African infrastructure financier told Reuters.

Nigeria is home to Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry yet is plagued by chronic power shortages, leaving its 140 million people without reliable mains electricity, and businesses and wealthy individuals rely on expensive diesel generators. The power crisis is a major brake on growth in sub-Saharan Africa’s second-biggest economy. Solving it could unlock the potential of a country dubbed “Africa’s sleeping giant” and yield huge returns for investors.

“There is a lot of interest, we’re certainly seeing that from a number of foreign investors,” Andrew Alli, chief executive of the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), said in an interview in his office in the commercial hub Lagos.

“First of all there are large companies who specialise in the power space who have several billion dollars available to invest and we’ve seen a number of those companies pass through Nigeria and express some interest in coming in,” he said. “We believe that if the environment is right they will come in and invest.”

President Goodluck Jonathan, who took office in May after the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua, has made improving domestic power supply one of his top priorities. But Nigerians have heard such promises before and his administration has little time left to act before presidential elections due by next April. Jonathan last month appointed Barth Nnaji, an engineering professor and former science minister, to head a taskforce on boosting power supply. Nnaji, who runs Nigeria’s first indigenously owned private sector power company and knows the challenges first hand, last week promised faster reforms to encourage foreign investors to take part in a planned privatisation programme.