Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s candidate in 2023 election , has expressed concerns about the incessant collapse of Nigeria’s power grid, which he believes is hindering the nation’s economic growth.
The Nigerian electricity supply industry, despite more than two decades of reform efforts, continues to face the risk of collapse due to the frequent and routine system collapses. These collapses are often caused by preventable situations, such as fire outbreaks at critical transmission lines in major cities, resulting from a lack of diligent attention.
Nigeria, with a population of over 200 million people and about 40 million small businesses, has a mere 13,000 Megawatts of installed capacity. Only about 3,500mws are available for homes and businesses from the grid, which can sometimes drop to 2,500mw. This is in stark contrast to countries like Egypt and South Africa, which have populations of approximately 112m and 59.6m people and supply about 60,000mw and 58,000mw, respectively. The difference in energy wattage has significant implications for human development and economic growth.
Experts consulted by Peter Obi attribute the power supply crisis in Nigeria to two major sectors: generation and transmission and distribution. The generation sector faces challenges such as the lack of a regular supply of gas due to the government’s failure to provide adequate gas infrastructure facilities, weak commercial availability of gas for power, and vandalism caused by youth restiveness.
For over eight years, Nigeria has not been able to resolve the infrastructural bottlenecks that constrain the supply of gas to power plants, despite billions spent from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to settle legacy gas debts.
On the transmission and distribution side, the last eight years have seen a failure to address the deterioration of networks, leading to poor coverage, ineffective coordination between the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and distribution companies (Discos), load rejection, and low public trust for policy reform on tariffs, which has discouraged private sector investments.
Peter Obi suggests that the Federal Government should immediately establish a technical task force of professionals without political considerations to diagnose the crisis in the sector, address simple issues like fire outbreaks that lead to system collapses, improve coordination and coherence between TCN and Discos, and ensure that operators fulfill their technical responsibilities.
These actions would quickly improve power availability in the short term while the government develops a comprehensive national electricity policy and an implementation roadmap that harmonizes national and subnational electricity reform efforts to ensure rapid and expansive delivery of reliable, adequate, and affordable electricity.
Nigeria, with its abundant resources, should not remain a nation of generators and darkness. Power is crucial for economic growth in the New Nigeria, to which Peter Obi remains committed.
