Pig-headed impunity: On March 20, this column had picked on a two-page advertorial by Chams Consortium Limited in a national newspaper. One had been moved by the plaintive cry of Chams, a foremost indigenous technology firm over the shoddy treatment meted to its consortium by the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) to which it had a contract to work on Nigeria’s identity cards.
In the Chams’ “Open Letter to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, His Excellency, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, the firm had cried out that NIMC management had converted its “concession agreement into segmented contracts to ‘selected’ third parties”, among other infractions to legitimate agreements. Most touching was that every avenue for settlement, including sending of emissaries, mediations and even the law courts were rebuffed by the NIMC.
The public outcry to the president was the only option left to Chams at that point to fight what seemed to have become a leviathan. One had been moved by the sheer injustice of the situation (in the face of it) to join in weeping for Chams. Though one is not certain how the Chams-NIMC rift eventually panned out, a similar scenario of primitive power show plays out in the matter between Professor Bathlomew Nnaji, President Goodluck Jonathan and his power ‘reform’ cabal.
A prophet without honour at home:Prof. Nnaji, twice minister of the Federal Republic and winner of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (2004) cried out bitterly in a half page article in national newspapers April 20, 2015. Any man of conscience may not be able to hold back tears after reading Nnaji’s piece. To think that Nnaji, a world renowned professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering who won the US Secretary of State’s Distinguished Public Service Award in 2005 is the same one being messed up by his home government.
The story in a nutshell is that Prof. Nnaji in collaboration of the Aba business community, the United State Agency for International Development (USAID) and a consortium of banks had nearly ten years ago gotten a concession from the Federal Government to supply electricity power to Aba (including Ariaria areas), Abia State.
The big idea was to build an integrated power project for this commercial area; a business model for power development in Nigeria that can stand alone, be self-sustaining and can be easily replicated in other major industrial and commercial cities of Nigeria.
With a Federal Government concession agreement in its kitty in 2005, began work on the 141megawatts Aba Integrated Power Project (AIPP or Aba Power). Some of the infrastructure built, according to Nnaji, include 141MW power plant with standard equipment from General Electric; rehabilitation of the entire distribution network in Aba and 105km of overhead transmission lines in Aba metropolis.
Aba Power also built numerous substations of varying sizes, new control building and 27km of gas pipeline among other gas infrastructure to ensure a reliable and no down-time fueling of the power plant. All of these cost about $500 million or N100 billion according to Prof. Nnaji.
So why wouldn’t Aba Power be switched on if it was ready to go since November 2013? It is said that at about this time, power privatisation was completed and the entire Southeast zone was ceded to the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) – including Aba metropolis. Since then, the management of EEDC has refused to let go and the Federal Government would not take a stand and affirm Aba Power’s agreement and legitimacy over Aba metropolis.
Hear it from Prof. Nnaji: “…The painful fact is that this critical issue has been left festering since November 2013. It costs the company $3.5 million in bank interest charges alone; plus more than N30 million for insurance coverage; and other operational expenses every single month to carry a project that is not yielding any revenue due to deliberate, hostile and crippling action of Enugu Disco and the BPE over 15 months ago.”
He noted further that about eight committees, including committees of the National Council on Privatization (NCP) and the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the Ministry of Power have investigated the matter and came up with the same recommendation: government should respect its agreement with Aba Power.
“This travesty has been cruel to us all,” Nnaji cries out in his piece. “We have made all efforts to get the BPE to correct what (for choice of a better word) may be called an “error”. So far, they have not yielded to doing the correct thing. Rather, they have sought to justify this error and have sought to justify this error and have continued to politicize the situation unnecessarily…”
Recall that Prof. Nnaji, acclaimed to be the best of President Goodluck Jonathan’s ministers was ‘removed’ unceremoniously as Power Minister over the privatization of Nigeria’s power assets. Recall also that the EEDC was controversially awarded to the current owners in spite of vehement protests by stakeholders from its zone of operation. EEDC has the entire five state of the southeast under its control – a very large expanse which it has managed very shoddily so far. Why would it illegally hold on to Aba which had been ceded to another if it has over a dozen other major cities of the southeast to tend to?
It is sad that the Jonathan administration chose to grow a reputation as a government that breaches it agreements and makes light of serious matters of state. Petty politicking and impunity almost became its brand identification signature.
If a man of Prof. Nnaji’s caliber could be meted with this manner of treatment one can only wonder what happens to ordinary Nigerians in the course of their routine relations with government. One is only at a loss as to why Nnaji and his group did not drag the Jonathan administration to court over this blatant show of primitive power.
