By Nuel Suji – Nigerian Senators on Wednesday stated that there is no solution insight to epileptic power problem across the country.
The federal lawmakers made the assertion while debating the burden of over-billing being shouldered by electricity consumers in the country.
Senator Dino Melaye had in a motion at Tuesday plenary, granted the go ahead to present the motion today after drawing the attention of senators to what he described as the exorbitant estimated billings being forced on consumers by the electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs) but senators during debate on the motion took the opportunity to bemoan the fate of Nigerians on the sector itself as presently being managed.
First to critically dissect the entire sector was Senator Ben Bruce (PDP Bayelsa East) who declared that Nigerians have catastrophe in their hands as far as the sector is concerned.
According to him, those currently running the sector are technically bankrupt due to a lot of factors not envisaged as at the time the privatization process was being implemented.
“They are technically bankrupt, unless we revisit the entire privatization process. Unless we understand and dissect what went wrong, we will still get estimated billing.
“We have a catastrophe in our hands; there will be no light in Nigeria under the current structure. No hope in sight, unless we revisit the process and try to understand what went wrong and bring in new players with required capacities.
“Those who privatised the sector did not imagine the naira will be devalued from 160 to about N400 now. Those who invested in the business thought it was like a company where they will make a lot of money. I believe they only had enough money to pay the federal government and make the initial investment; they did not have the capacity to run a power sector company in a modern economy”, he said.
Making similar lamentation in his own contribution, Senator Bukar Mustapha (APC, Katsina State), said going by realities on ground in the sector, the country is sitting on an emergency without any sign of immediate solution.
According to him, though the nation has capacity for generation of over 12,000mega watts but only 4,000mw have been so far achieved at any time out of which 1,800mw are paid for by consumers, making the providers to be in perpetual indebtedness.
He said: “The problem we have is the inefficiency within the system which we have actually so far not decided to address. I will give you a small example: Nigeria has an installed capacity of 12,522 Megawatts of power. We have non-available of 5,300. We have non-operational capacity of 3,180; meaning that the amount that is actually available is just over 4,000 Megawatts out of 12,500.
“We have transmission loss of 228mw, we have distribution `loss of 447 Megawatts. At the end of the day, only 3,800 Megawatts reaches the consumer. And we have commercial loss of more than 36 percent.
“So, what is actually being paid for out of the over 3,000 Megawatts is only 1,800 Megawatts. So unless and until we decide to look at these inefficiency within the value chain there is no way we can have better electricity generation, distribution and also billing system in the country.
“This to me, is clearly a case of the country sitting on an emergency and a practical way out must be worked out by concerned authorities before we can be talking of steady power supply”
