During his Senate screening prior to his assumption of duties, Chinedu Nebo, Nigeria’s new power minister, reportedly declared that Nigeria’s “dark days” will soon be over! Already, the Federal Government had said it plans to generate 10,000 mega watts of electricity by the end of December 2013.
Nigeria, Africa’s second largest economy—with a population of 160 million people, is one of the world’s resource-rich countries, but it currently has the highest demand-supply gap in electricity generation in the world. The capacity of its existing electricity infrastructure is grossly inadequate to meet the electricity need of its large population; hence it has one of the lowest electricity per capital in the world at 22.8 watts compared to South Africa at 1,093 watts, Brazil at 535 watts and Ghana at 88 watts.
Last year, the nation experienced albeit briefly, what many saw as an appreciable improvement, which was attributed to the determined efforts of the erstwhile power minister, Barth Nnaji. Therefore, when it emerged that he had resigned from the Federal Executive Council as the minister of power in August last year, it was seen in some quarters as a ploy by some powerful interests to frustrate the power reform process.
Now that Nigeria has a new minister who apparently has been entrusted with the mandate of continuing the power sector reforms instituted by his predecessor, it is expected that the ‘dark days’ would indeed, soon be over.
Last week, the minister acknowledged that there are a number of challenges facing the power sector that have continued to hinder effective service delivery of electricity to Nigerians, noting that transmission of electricity remained one of the greatest challenges in the power sector. He however added that government was focusing its attention on this and other problematic areas to ensure that the expectations of Nigerians were met in the shortest possible time.
“What we have as a problem that is very significant is the transmission—to be able to evacuate what is being generated and what we anticipate will be an addition to the grid towards the end of the year. We are working on that and today’s meeting is addressing some of those issues,” he had said at the end of a meeting of the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) presided over by Vice President Namadi Sambo at the State House, Abuja.
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