These days, it is doubtful that Nigerians still pay attention to the happenings in the cesspit of incompetence and graft described rather charitably as the power sector.
I refer here to the latest report that the federal government has revised its power supply target to 5,000Mega Watts (MW) by the end of the year. Only last month, Minister of Power Prof. Chinedu Nebo, had raised hopes while addressing a delegation of Indian investors that “Nigeria will hit 10,000MW by the end of 2014”.
But at an inter-ministerial briefing last week, Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke would have no soothing words for Nigerians expecting the December turnaround: The best, she said, is “a generation capacity of at least 5,000MW within 4-5 months” – and “barring unforeseen circumstances”.
So much for the plague of confusion ravaging Jonathan’s power sector. It’s certainly been a long, confounding exercise in the reducing arithmetic of Jonathan’s power sector where the more money they throw at it, the less the value that is delivered in return.
Let’s see how we started. In 1999, the nation’s generation capacity was said to be 6,000MW (ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo would have us know that the actual deliverable was 1,500MW”). Even at that, Obasanjo summary of the state of the power sector as rendered to the Ndudi Elumelu panel of the House of Representatives which probed his administration remains instructive: Ijora and Oji River stations, both of which utilised coal, were down due to lack of coal production; Afam and Delta, both of which were gas thermal plants were obsolete. The hydro plants of Kanji, Jebba and Shiroro were no better. Apart from silting and/or inadequate flow of water into the dam, there was also the problem of poor maintenance. Egbin, the thermal plant suffered disruption of gas supply through vandalism and poor management and maintenance by staff. And so, the effective output was 1,500MW.
What did he do and how far did he go?
First, a new Afam 276MW thermal unit was installed and commissioned. This would be followed by Agip’s 480MW thermal unit at Okpai. Then Papalanto, Omotosho, Alaoji and Geregu plants each of which could provide close to 1000MW.
The next would be the National Integrated Power Projects located at Sapele (Delta), Ehobor (Edo), Egbema (Imo), Gbaram (Bayelsa), Calabar (Cross River) and Omoku (Rivers).
From this stage, the riddle begins. A total of 34 companies were awarded contracts to bring in turbines under the NIPP. By design, their output, combined with the four thermal plants was to deliver 10,000MW by 2007/2008. That is aside the existing 1,500 MW which Obasanjo claimed he met. Nearly 10 years after, we are still struggling to hit 6,000MW by December!
Where did the megawatts disappear to? What happened to the turbines? Is gas really the only problem; or is it merely a smokescreen covering an intricate web of criminality? Who are the contractors by the way? How many performed or failed to? In the confounding riddles which have brought the sector to this sorry pass, we may never get the answers. True, Obasanjo may have brought plenty of motion without locomotion to the sector; and methodical Yar’Adua, his signature inertia; with President Goodluck Jonathan, there has been neither rhyme nor method to the reign of abdication and the culture of criminal indifference that it has spawned!
Where are the excuses for an administration – which, courtesy of the Gabriel Suswan committee on the NIPP – was allowed to warehouse the NIPP funds? Or have we forgotten so soon? For how long will the ancillary gas infrastructure remain in the pipeline?
Between the grandmaster con-artist and his minion handmaiden in crime, there is a lot that needs finding out!
By next year, the nation would mark the 10th anniversary of the much trumpeted Power Sector Reform Act (PSR 2005). Many – including yours truly, had welcomed the legislation convinced that it actually held the key to unlocking the potentials of the sector.
Among the key expectations was that it would end government’s near-monopoly which had bred lethargy, corruption and inefficiency in the sector. The story was that because the sector was wholly in the hand of government, the incentive to align its business practices with the dictates of the market was simply not there; and so was the will and the discipline to anticipate future needs and plan appropriately lacking – hence the steady decline into the moribund sector that we now have.
Underlying the reform therefore was the need to liberalise the sector, to get more players on board in the spirit of true competition, and to ensure a steady flow of investment, which, no thanks to the erstwhile environment was stifled.
And the result nearly 10 years after? The promises have since disappeared into the wind.
It is still the same old wearisome excuses, of alibis being recycled or repackaged and sold to the weary electricity consumer with very little signs of impending change.
Indeed, what we have is a new wine of instruments of legislation and regulation in the old wineskins of poor and ineffective governance. The old PHCN behemoth is gone for good; now we have a group of disparate club of players – that have demonstrated neither the financial muscle nor the business intelligence to suggest that they are able to get things going. The result is the endless promises as against actual delivery of electricity to homes and businesses just as the regulator appears clueless.
Ten years during which the nation is supposed to have made some progress, we are only moved marginally from where we were 10 years ago. This is in spite of the massive investment sunk in to stabilise and upgrade the sector – an outlay known to have exceeded $20 billion under the decade.
The explanations are not far-fetched: good as the principle of liberalisation is, in the hand of an utterly incompetent government, it becomes an exercise in abdication.
For instance, how does one explain the fact that a government that has divested substantial interests in its erstwhile entities could still not muster funds to invest massively in gas infrastructure known to be critical to the reform package? And that nearly 10 years after establishing Letters of Credit for the NIPP plants, a good number remains uncompleted?
The Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) would rather we do not talk about the mess their messiah has wreaked on the power sector, the economy and the polity as a whole. Much as they try deodorising their principal, there are simply some truths that cannot be wished away.
