The federal Ministry of Power in Nigeria, says it is working with relevant stakeholders in the sector to come up with a roadmap that would help restore the hope of electricity consumers in the country.
The Minister of Power, Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, who stated this at a one-day interaction session with journalists in Abuja, the nation’s capital, said that the challenges facing the ministry are multidimensional, but his administration will work to deliver on the President Tinubu’s renewed hope agenda in growing the economy of the country.
He explained that the power sector is very important to the nation’s development, stressing that the rural economy depends on the power to grow their businesses.
“Small businesses, rural irrigation, cocktail business and industries needs power to operate. We need to produce significant portion of what we consume otherwise the currency of another country we use for international trade will be so important to you, so we need to move to local sufficiency and increase our local dependency to increase our incremental progress on a yearly basis till we get to our desired destination,” he said.
While responding to question on the operations of Electricity Distribution Companies, otherwise known as DisCos in Nigeria, the Minister disclosed that the Nigeria government may not be able to revisit the contract at the moment but it is working on territorial coverage by creating mini-DISCO for some States in the federation for efficient coverage to serve consumer’s need.
He also caledl on State governments to work and collaborate with the DISCOs in their various State by playing more roles and investing in the power sector through the DISCO.
The Minister further stated that the Ministry will dialogue with DISCO to deliberate on the best way to move the sector forward.
According to him the Nigerian government is not ready to increase the electricity tariff.
“It is not politically expedient and reasonable to implement a tariff that is doubling the existing tariff, because part of the reason of an escalated tariff is because the cost of gas today is still done in dollars and today 75 to 80 percent of our power generation comes from gas power, when there is an upward movement in exchange rate it affects the tariff.”
On the issue of license extension for DISCOs, the Minister said he has ordered investigation into the extension by five years.
“When I came in, the licenses I saw was for 10 years, 2013 to 2023. But along the line I spoke to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC Chairman, he said, the licences have been extended for another five years.”
“We are trying to review the correctness of that. We have ordered investigation into the extension of the licenses if they actually in order,” he said.
The Minister said he doesn’t believe that privatization of the power sector assets infrastructures was the way to go about in the power sector, declaring that commercialisation could have been better as it required huge financial investment outlay which the private sector may afford or may not be willing to commit because its long term returns yields.
According to him, government needs to review the structures of DisCos with regards to streamlining the areas of coverages which the Minister observed are too large for each of the DisCos to manage effectively.
Adelabu also appealed to Journalists for a more transparent reportage on the activities of the ministry.
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