Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu. Few Nigerians today remember the Minister of Power for his high octane visits to Zungeru, Shiroro and Kainji Dams in the quest for power stabilisation. Rather, the talk is all about Friday’s miscue regarding how Nigerians should consume less of what is not available. For this, most Nigerians who have spoken of Friday’s ministerial outing have been as unsparing as they are uncharitable. Some have dubbed it a disaster. It’s probably worse.
“A lot of people will come back from work and they want to have dinner or they want to play with their colleagues down the road, they switch on the AC for the room to be cooling before they come back.
“Some people will be going to work in the morning and their freezers are left on for days… when all their items are frozen. This is because they are not paying enough.
“We have all been overseas before, we know how conscious the power consumers are to consumption of electricity; this will enable us to manage consumption”.
Those were the minister’s words. And this was just days after the federal government hiked electricity tariff from N66 per kilowatt to N255 for a category of users.
As one might expect, Nigerians’ reactions have been utterly predictable, with many understandably angry. And this is not necessarily because the minister spoke out of turn but because he said something that was considered out of sync with the general mood in the country.
Couldn’t the government have waited until perhaps, when things calmed a bit, before another hike on utilities is slapped on hapless Nigerians – they reasoned?
Others, perhaps less charitable have, while reflecting on the pervasive dip in power supply across the country, saw the press conference as more of a forum by a somewhat overwhelmed minister to market alibis as panacea.
Most probably have a point. With the nerves already fraying, couldn’t the minister have spared the people the lecture?
The point remains though: there can be no running away from the problem. Indeed, the problem would appear to be more fundamental than what the government has been willing to put out. In fact, it is multi-layered. From the problem of gas supply to the generating plants, to forex issues, a grid system so prone to fits that it is best described as ‘abiku’, and finally an analogue distribution segment that lives by robbing the consumer to keep afloat, the image of an ill-fitting contraption could not have been more stark.
Which is why the solutions often passed out as a possible way out of the conundrum have tended to be either simplistic or plain opportunistic.
To heap the blames on the current minister who has only been a few months on the job is to ignore the deep structural issues underlying the current rot.
And now that sector has turned full cycle with the problems still enduring, the minister has only resorted to a tough call – in the figurative sense of the chick and the egg –the matter of which should come first. Unfortunately, whereas most Nigerians would readily frame the problem as subsidy removal, the government sees the push as one of cost recovery! And both are damn right!
Talk of full metamorphosis of the Nigerian electricity consumer. Remember the old National Electric Power Authority (NEPA)? Famed for ineptitude, inefficiency and its culture of corruption, it was everything a public utility should not be. It neither had a programme of expansion in anticipation of the ever-growing needs of its customers, nor a maintenance regime to keep its system performing. Instead of a structured funding plan to guarantee its sustenance, and lacking in the motivation to collect its due revenues, it managed to survive on the budgetary lifelines dished out by the government. Its successor, the Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was no better with Nigerians no sooner after rechristening it as Problem Has Changed Name (PHCN)!
And so came the Power Sector Reform Act (2005); a supposedly transformational legislation designed to address those age-long problems. The rationale was that the sector needed to attract fresh capital that was no longer available to the government. Secondly, that the stifling bureaucracy was such that would neither permit nor afford the expertise and operational models that was required to transform the sector. And finally, that a new governance structure had to be in place to get things moving. And with the private sector’s enormous financial muscle said to be available to draw out to the pool of expertise needed to turn the sector around, such was the picture painted of the future of the sector that could not have been anything but glowing.
Nearly two decades on, Nigerians know better. Indeed, the old problem has merely morphed! In place of the old behemoth, we have a motley assembly of anaemic service providers that are private only in name. Yes, they continue to rely on the government for bailouts and other financial guarantees. As for the electricity consumer, he is still in the business of procuring transformers and other service accoutrements which are immediately appropriated by the Distribution Companies (DisCos). He is also required to pay for electricity meters, pay for upgrades whenever this becomes necessary – all of these without as much a thought to fair, equitable dealing. And all of these under a so-called regulator, National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) best described as ineffectual.
Talk of the changing faces of the problem from season to season. Olusegun Obasanjo – the supposed midwife of the farce packaged as reform blew billions of dollars away in importation of nearly a dozen turbines most of which never made it to the project sites. Umaru Yar’Adua freely bandied ‘emergency’ to underscore the enormity of the challenge until the word lost its meaning. Goodluck Jonathan may have unbundled the old PHCN behemoth into more manageable entities, yet, he is best remembered for handing them over to inept operators. Over all, he somewhat treated the sector as just another problem to be kicked down the road!
As for Muhammadu Buhari with his ‘body language’, he offered what was at best a placebo to a problem that was organic!
I truly hope that those angry with President Tinubu’s Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, understand where the country is coming from and hopefully agree on the need to chart a different path going forward. For whereas the minister may have touched the raw nerves of a frustrated citizenry on the matter of tariff classification, nothing that he said could be deemed to be outside of what is provided for in the Multi-Year-Tariff –Order (MYTO) as outlined in the NERC regulations. For yours truly, the minister’s sin is not about what he said but what he failed to say – which is when the current climate of darkness will lift!
Other than the tariff issue, Nigerians want to see those things being done differently.
