Up till sometime last week, I guess it was so easy to put the hiccups being experienced in the power sector to the birth pangs of the historic transition. However, unlike many among the army of critics of the transition, yours sincerely did not suffer the illusion that the singular event of the handover of the distribution companies to private sector operators would come near the magic wand being bandied; the same goes with the undue expectations that the problems that have dogged the sector would vanish overnight because some new owners said to have plenty of cash have suddenly arrived town.
Beyond the question of whether the handover was historic or not, it takes a good understanding of the complex dynamics of the power sector to appreciate the fact that nothing was as yet (at least at this stage), given. Had the administration not been so eager to cart home the trophy before the final call of the game, it would have been more tempered in creating the climate of expectations and by so doing, spare itself, and the hapless electricity consumer, the orgy of celebrations of what is no more than a modest achievement of ceding the retail end of the electricity business to a disparate club of businessmen.
And to imagine that is supposed to be the dividend of the reform odyssey that has taken nearly 10 years to berth. Now, it seems everyone, not least the government, would have to re-learn the lesson on the danger of counting the chicks before they are hatched.
No doubt, the ugly experience of the past few months in the power sector must have been disappointing, to say the least for many Nigerians. And this is not just for the failure of the historic handover to fundamentally alter the electricity supply terrain but also for the fact that the harvest of new plants into the grid is yet to take the nation beyond the dark curtains. Presently, not only is the talk about the extant service thresholds taking a dip to unprecedented abysmal levels, the sad and uncomfortable reality is that the so-called jinx, which has held the sector down appears to have resurrected. While the current state of flux strikes at the heart of what the on-going reforms is meant to achieve, the latest fad of blaming the distribution companies (discos) for problems that are not their making is not only unfair but unhelpful.
Two issues seem to me to be at the heart of the current crisis in the power sector both of which hardly present the government as anything but one running on alibis.
The first is its continuing claim about the gas supply situation; linked to this is the recurrent claim of vandalisation of the gas pipelines by criminals.
The second is the slow pace of completion of the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPPs) expected to boost the capacity of the grid.
On the first, it seems taken that no substantial progress can be achieved without improvements in generation and the ability to evacuate the power so generated for sale to the end users. Unfortunately, it appears that our federal government has long resolved that the twin challenges of gas supply and the associated vandalism of pipelines and transmission lines are such that would require a millennium to tackle.
Nothing, perhaps, can be more unflattering than the fact that nearly a decade after the coming of the Power Sector Reform Act, and seven years after the government opened the first tranche of the Letters of Credit for the procurement of the equipment for the NIPPs, we are not just stuck with worn alibis, the serial shifting of the goal posts for the completion of the plants continues unabated.
By the way, who remembers these days the 700 KV Super grid projected to cost of $3.5 billion grid on which President Goodluck Jonathan once pronounced? What has happened nearly four years after?
No wonder the hype about the transfer of the distribution segment to private investors; the whole idea, it would seem, is to present it as the weakest link – the major undoing of the complex chain when in reality, the interest in that last mile is no more than the typical desire to share in the nation’s booty by the privileged elite.
It certainly may not have helped that the new investors and the regulators have not been forthcoming in terms of delivering a new framework for service delivery; it is however a different call to present the discos as the problem when they are actually no more than symptoms of the Nigerian Disease of mediocrity.
Should Nigerians expect improvement in electricity supply anytime soon? For an answer to the question, we turn to the chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, Sam Amadi as reported by The Punch. I may well add that I found his summary of the so-called transition milestone both interesting and instructive.
Here is what he said: “Yes we have oversold the handing over as a panacea; may be because we had expected people who had enough financial clouts to take over but they did not…what the regulator is doing is manage the scarcity to see if we can get entry points for more power through regeneration!
That was the regulator, barely stopping short of describing an exercise, touted as marking the turning point in the power sector reform as an elaborate farce!
I need to make an important point at this juncture. I don’t for believe that the argument for the liberalisation of the power sector is necessarily weakened by the dilatory approaches of successive PDP administrations. Indeed, it seems to me that the argument for opening up the sector for competition has become even more compelling now. To start with, I don’t think Nigerians would find much troubles in answering the question of whether a quarter of what the PDP administration has sunk into the power sector would deliver by far more value to the grid if given to the private sector. Rather the more pertinent question is whether the nation can afford to leave the power sector in the hands of the utterly inept, visionless administration that have done little else than mismanage our expectations from the sector.
