Nigeria @ 56: Daunting challenges still weigh heavy on Power sector

As Nigeria Africa’s second biggest oil producer marked her 56th year of achieving colonial independence last year, analysts expressed strong concern that the country has not attained its optimum level of development in the power sector, compared to the huge potential in material resources.

While industry watchers were optimistic that the Buhari-led administration would bring succour to the sector bedevilled by gross decadence in infrastructure, transmission, distribution capacity, lack of transparency, Gas shortages, pipeline vandalism, inadequate funding and unprofitable prices, the president’s response to the sector challenges has eroded the confidence of

Electricity, which acts as catalyst for economic development in most developed countries, eludes Nigeria as poor power supply continues to inhibit the growth of virtually all sectors of the economy.

Efforts in the past by successive governments to stabilise the epileptic power system have failed due to lack of co-ordinated plan of action and inherent corruption from the leaders despite billions of dollars the government claimed to have spent.

Discos continue to hinge their inability to meet its service delivery obligations on lack of access to foreign exchange as revenue shortfall has adversely impacted the ability of the Discos to make capital investments in metering, network expansion, equipment rehabilitation and replacement that are critical to service delivery improvement.

“Nigeria doesn’t have a very strong network of gas pipelines such that if one is vandalise, we can route the gas through another pipeline, ” Dolapo Oni, Head, Energy Research, Ecobank Development Company (EDC) Nigeria Limited, told Business in a chat.

He further observed that Nigeria’s power sector was set up on a wrong footing from the beginning.

According to him, “Nigeria should have phased her privatisation. Maybe we should have done the discos first and ensure that we sort out all the problems at the disco level and then we move to transmission sort out all the issues at the transmission level before we move to generation”

Government need to ensure that the right tariff are set up and need to create regulation to support proper collection of tariff , criminalise power theft (illegal connection) so that people will pay for power. Give Nigerians the option of being able to switch to any source of power that they want to use”.

Industry watchers insists that as the country enter into a new phase of her existence, one strategic way to address the growing challenge in the sector is for the Government to enforce the roll out of meters. Discos should deliver meters to everybody. You can charge it over a period of time, but everybody should have proper meters. These are things government need to put in place.

They observe Transmission is still in the hand of government. They need to expand transmission capacity. Transmission should always lead generation. You can’t be generating 7,000 mega watts and be transmitting only 4,000.”

KELECHI EWUZIE