Nigeria’s paltry on-grid electricity supply capacity is creating huge and disturbing demand-supply disequilibrium to a point of national embarrassment. The Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, recently admitted that for the incessant erratic power supply in the country, the Nigerian economy would have been in more robust health. So bad is the situation that a coalition of local human rights activists, labour unions, journalists and lawyers led by Socio-economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) had, through a joint petition, propelled the United Nations to support a Joint Letter of Concern to be written to the Federal Government in which they expressed concerns that “access to electricity is a significant problem in Nigeria.” The problem is getting worse with no solution in sight. That this is happening despite the recent liberalisation of the sector by the Federal Government to allow heavy private sector participation calls for serious concern. The Dr. Goodluck Jonathan administration has a constitutional and moral responsibility to intervene to ameliorate the situation.
Before the current parlous situation, the total volume of electricity generated in the country stood at a miserly 4,000MW. And this is for a country with a population of 170 million inhabitants. Since the beginning of 2013, the nation’s power supply has been characterised by a cyclic hope and despair situation, a development, which has been blamed on frequent system collapse and several other man-made factors. A sharp drop in power supply was first noticed in January 2013 when Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC) shut down the Okpai Power Plant in Delta State for repairs, reducing generation by 460MW before it rose again to 4,286MW peak for the month. Although it hit 4,350MW in February, by March 26, 2013, the figure had dropped to 3,670MW.
After a slight improvement, the situation worsened further to 2,866.4MW in the same month as a result of general system failure during the first half of 2013. Last January, the supply dropped by about 300MW as a result of an expected shutdown of the Shiroro power plant for engineering check. And with other compounding issues, power outages in the country have metamorphosed into complete darkness in most parts of Nigeria, while many urban cities and towns across the country hardly enjoy three to four hours of uninterrupted power supply a day. In very bad cases, Nigerians go without public power supply for weeks, if not months in parts of the country.
The unwholesome development is making many Nigerians to lose confidence in the power reforms of the present administration, whose fulcrum is the privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). It has become obvious that the DISCOs and GENCOs brought into the power reform template to handle power distribution and generation respectively, are getting too slow to put their acts together. While we appreciate the fact that post-sale teething problems are variables they would contend with, they have not demonstrated the right panache needed to surmount them.
The role of electricity in national development cannot be over emphasised. Business, commerce, and in fact living, revolve round it. No doubt, any country lacking in sufficient electricity is condemned to remaining a rural backwater for ever. We cannot but bemoan the current tragic situation, especially when juxtaposed against the fact that the country has more than enough raw materials to generate sufficient electricity to meet its industrial and domestic needs. Nigeria has large quantities of natural gas, which is clean and cheap, for the production of electricity. Sadly, this product has continuously been flared, thereby bringing in its wake green house effect and ecological damage to the environment. The tragedy of electricity shortage in the country owes its origin to the inability of successive administrations to invest in gas production, particularly for electricity generation. Rather than upgrade and build new infrastructures to meet the growing needs of industries and households, governments have allowed the existing ones to deteriorate. The lack of investment overtime meant that the country has lagged behind in modern technology and manpower to generate and distribute enough electricity across the country. It is disgusting that rather than finding lasting solution to the long running problems bedeviling the sector, those charged with the responsibility of supervising it have chosen to be indifferent, or lack any clues on how to solve the problem. For this reason therefore, President Goodluck Jonathan must move very fast to save the power sector reform of his administration.
