#NigeriaToday: Nigeria’s Electricity Crisis

Nigeria’s epileptic power supply has taken a turn for the worse in recent months. Despite investing over $30 billion in the sector in the past 15 years, the total electricity supply as at today is less than a mere 1,400 megawatts (MW) for a country of over 170 million people.

As a result, the citizens and businesses have resorted to use of electric generators to the point where some industry experts are placing the frontal cost, including imported fuel, as high as the size of annual national budget. 

This mire has provoked a wide range of debates with a host of powerful voices overtly urging the President-elect Muhammadu Buhari to scrap current power sector reform altogether.

But any temptation to toe that line readily translates to a right cause on the wrong course. The problem is definitely not the policy by itself. The gospel truth that the highly celebrated “Road Map for Power Sector Reform” under President Goodluck Jonathan has simply missed its bearing, but can be redirected under a common sense leadership.

The power roadmap was conceived on a charming premise that deregulation and privatization are twin catalysts for energy eldorado. Although the Jonathan people pursued the power agenda with admirable zeal; little did they know that a reliable service delivery in the power sector required more than mere theory.

Yet they marginalized a central theory on privatization which clearly states that the effectiveness as well as efficiency is contingent upon the environment. 

The industry naïveté is further exposed when considered that the committee on power would fail to recognize that any concept which advocates corporate profits at the crude expense of public interest cannot be ideal in this stage of Nigerian national development where an average citizen lives on less than one dollar per day.

Culled from Vanguard.