Aare Kola Oyefeso is the Chairman/Chief Executive, Kotco Energy Nigeria Limited, a pioneer transformer manufacturing company in Nigeria and West Africa sub-region. In this interview with Daniel Adeleye, he speaks on the nation’s intractable power crisis among other related issues. Excerpts:
THERE have been claims in some quarters that most times power generation equipment rot away at the ports due to delay in clearing. How would you react to this?
It does. The only difference is that if you’re a private company and import something you have to ensure that you clear them so that you don’t pay demurrage but if you’re in government the lackadaisical attitude is there. But you won’t see a private person that imports something and allow it to rot away. That person who has imported as a private person may have gone to the bank to borrow money and he has a period to refund the money without which the interest is going to rise. So if you don’t want to get crushed by the weight of interest rate you have to clear the goods, sell them and refund the money to the bank. But government is a different thing, before an official may know that they have goods at the port it may be another two to three years.
Nigeria is reputed to be the major market for power generators with annual expenditure put at over N150b. Do you share these sentiments?
It is very obvious; every house is a mini power station. When you look at the number of companies that are operating without government energy then, that figure is realistic.
Is power generator the only alternative to electricity generation?
The alternative is very straight forward; nobody wants to run generator in his house. We are only running generator as the last resort because, first it is very noisy and secondly it causes air pollution. There is nothing like government control energy, we were forced to go for generator and mark it, we have serious problem. Our population is hitting almost 200 million and we are still struggling to generate below 5000 megawatts and we call ourselves giant of Africa, whereas South Africa is generating almost 40,000 with lesser population. So the problem is there. If Nigeria generates 20,000 today it will be taken up immediately because a lot of people that are using generators will get energy. So the only way out is to hub the generation. And to hub it is not a child’s play. Former president Obasanjo left power almost 12 years ago, he promised 5,000 megawatts and we are still struggling with that same 5,000. We ask ourselves what has happened or what is happening? To be honest with ourselves, there is a serious problem.
The federal government recently signed a partnership agreement on Nigeria Electrification Roadmap with Siemens AG to upgrade the nation’s power transmission and distribution infrastructure. Can this approach end the erratic power supply?
It is very easy to sign agreements but it is more challenging to cope with the terms of agreement. Though I’ve not seen the agreement but when you look at the agreement, some bilateral agreement would have been there, what Siemens will do and what Nigeria will do. Maybe counterpart funding or whatever and once you don’t do your own part, you have short-circuited that agreement. So agreement is good on paper, implementation is a different ball game. But we pray that they have the energy and the capacity to fulfil the conditions of that agreement so that we can get rid of our energy crisis. To come out from this quagmire we need to have steady government for 25-30 years. Steady government means a government that will not come and truncate the efforts of the previous government. When former president Olusegun Obasanjo was in power, he issued out a lot of contracts with a view to improving the energy sector. But the late president Musa Yar’Adua came for about two years he didn’t know what to do with those contracts. So policy summersault can lead to discontinuity of an otherwise lofty programme.
How can Nigeria overcome the challenge of epileptic power supply?
The first thing is to have a country that everybody believes in. And for us to have that, we must come to a roundtable and determine our togetherness. Whatever we are doing now, whatever we are managing now or whatever we are grappling with was imposed on us by our British lords who never meant well for us. But we cannot continue to blame them forever. It is contraction that was never packaged to succeed. For us to be together today is by miracle, because they expected that by now Nigeria should have been disintegrated. But fortunately we had Biafra war in the 60s and people saw what war is and because people saw what war is, they are too scared of war now, which is good. The people that pushed Nigeria into war then were youngsters of between 28-32 years of age. But now we have matured people ruling Nigeria who have seen war and know the true meaning of war. So the solution to Nigeria’s problem is sincerity. The Bible says righteousness exalts a nation. The fundamental thing is to be righteous. We need to sit down and renegotiate our unity. The constitution that bonded us together was given to us by the British and it was tinkered with by the military hoping that they will come back. We have two houses; the Senate and the House of Representatives who are doing the same thing. Can we afford it because the US is doing it? US sees itself as the government of the world, they cannot afford a mistake that’s why they have two houses. Are we in the same boat with America? The Senate and House of Representatives here are doing the same identical job. How do you expect a country to move forward where the take home of a legislator is over N30 million a month? What kind of economy are we discussing in such a deception and fraudulent contraction? So we need, as a matter of urgency to renegotiate our togetherness as a nation.
As the pioneer transformer manufacturing company in Nigeria and the entire West Africa sub region, what has been your contribution in the area of power distribution as the case may be?
We believe that having being a pioneer transformer manufacturer company in Nigeria for over 40 years; we should be able to give something into the country. But we are not okay because the government is not supporting us. Every year it is allowed to bring what is set out to manufacturer in the country. As a result of this, they bring sub-standard and under checked transformers, so how can you cope? This further shows the lack of seriousness on the part of the nation’s economic managers. Even the energy sector itself is a fraud. For over 40-50 years, Nigeria has been supplementing the energy sector. They gave money to the then NEPA every year, to help us have light. Now the sector has been privatised and government still asked the buyers to charge the same amount before it was privatised. What kind of fraud is that? Energy, whether we want it or not, is not a social service, as government can run social service but the private owners cannot run social service because they’ve gone to the banks to access funds to buy those things and they must be able to break even and make returns. So that’s another fraud. You cannot control what you don’t have. If you have privatised something you must give liberty to the buyers to charge. For instance, go to some areas in Lagos, they are having light 24 hours because they pay commensurate to what they consume. But as long as you’re not ready to pay adequately, how can you expect power? I told you that for over 50 years, energy delivery was done at subsidised rate. They gave NEPA billions of naira every year to keep it running. Now that they have sold to stop the subvention and you can’t expect the private investors that bought to sell at that same subsidised rate. Nobody runs charity; they are into business to make money. The problem here is policy.
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