If We Can’t Get Electricity Right, Forget Nigeria http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/index.php/content/view/11436/55
Written by Tunde Fagbenle
Monday, 09 February 2009
If We Can’t Get Electricity Right, Forget Nigeria
Tunde Fagbenle
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If the title of this piece sounds harsh or alarmist in anyone’s ears, then such a one is either complacently ignorant of the magnitude of the mess in which we are enmeshed as a country or is one of those complicit in the grand deceit and larceny of our collective fortune and future. Simply put, a country that has no clue on how, or lacks the collective will, to provide uninterrupted power supply to meet her domestic and industrial needs loses her locus standi as a modern nation.
When Mr Umaru Yar’Adua came to power as our president, he soberly put the issue of electric power as his highest priority. Indeed to underscore the imperative, he said a “state of emergency” would be declared in the power sector as the cornerstone of his well touted but now banal“7-point Agenda”. Almost two years on, neither the “state of emergency” nor the emergency of our state has dawned on his government.
President Yar’Adua is looking as helpless, even as hopeless, as his fire-spitting predecessor ended up after 8 years in the saddle and the exhaustion of his clustered wit. Obasanjo, a retired general, swore to deal with the power problem once and for all. His first power minister, our late Uncle Bola Ige, even naively ruled a deadline of 6 months! But six years later, and almost as many power ministers in turn, it was clear the old general had been generally overpowered by the power he sought to power.
This is not a time to play on words; we are a nation in crisis. The crisis of power is now the crisis of our nationhood. And the enormity of the challenge challenges our collective conscience. The statistics of waste – of resources and of human life – is colossal and jeer at us. Is there something in us either in Nigeria or as Nigerians that condemns us to folly in perpetuity? For I do not think there is any other country on earth, or any other peoples, who will be faced with our situation and would be unable or unwilling to collectively say “so far and no more.”
Let us take a cursory look at some of the soul-destroying statistics gathered from Vanguard newspaper and AFP reports: In the first week of January alone, Central Bank sold about N1.180 billion worth of foreign currency to 15 firms for the importation of power generating sets! Last year alone, average residential expenditure on fuelling power generators was N1.56 trillion. The estimate for commercial and industrial fuelling of generating sets was over N4 trillion! More than 400 of the about 500 industries Kano, the commercial hub of the North, had in the 1990s have closed down due largely to “chronic electricity shortages”. Last month, a 75 year-old man, Pa Michael Aiweriokhoe, his wife and four members of his family were found dead on a Monday morning in their home in Benin-city, of fume inhalation from the family’s electricity generating set. Amongst the dead were two young graduates, future of Nigeria. This unfortunate family join the statistics of thousands of such calamity the country bears yearly.
To underscore the government’s resignation to the situation, the 2009 budget allocates over N2 billion for the running of government generators!
So, one cannot but ask, what manner of country is this? How can a country live with such annual capital haemorrhage that far exceeds the cost of putting in place a sustainable uninterrupted nationwide power supply? What is wrong with our brains?
We are a people motivated solely by selfish and self-centred needs, and the thought of sacrificing personal interest in pursuit of common good is anathema to us. We are drunken in our individuality. Hence, you find in one house of eight flats, 8 generators if not 12 (allowing for back-ups), each competing in the display of value and capacity! Why is it impossible, you ask, for all four flats to come to an arrangement to trade in all 8 or 12 generators for 2 (one as standby) each with double the capacity of the foreseeable energy requirement of all the flats? It will save everyone a lot of money, and give the occupants a healthier environment. On some streets, in affluent sections of our cities, there are generators in every house, each with capacity to meet the energy requirement of all the houses on the entire street. It is said, and not without some validity, that the amount and capacity of generators in Lagos and Abuja alone can power all of Nigeria!
For answers, I turned to my brother, Professor Layi Fagbenle, an internationally recognised energy expert who was Director of Energy for Botswana for a few years and a consultant to the United Nations on energy. And I must add, the poor fellow continues to bear the burden, especially in Abacha years, of having a look-alike younger brother in me!
If he did it for Botswana, could he do it for Nigeria?
My brother demurred. Nigeria is a peculiar case, he said. The problem, he thinks, is more social than economic. The bane, he thinks, is corruption; deep-rooted, pervasive corruption at all levels, and grievous erosion of right societal values. He thinks Nigeria’s situation defies understanding. While he rates corruption in all forms as the foremost problem, he considers management inefficiency in some areas, general lack of maintenance culture, and lack of the spirit of a collective essence, as others. People do not baulk at cheating, stealing, vandalising, destroying public utilities and would any day sacrifice the common good for immediate personal gains.
He asks, why, for instance, would a country have three brand new gas turbine stations capable of providing 1,000 megawatts – Papalanto in Ogun State, Omotosho in Ondo State, and Deregu in Kogi State – installed for almost 2 years without functioning for one day, even as the nation groans in darkness? So, he says, it’s not a question of lack of maintenance alone, these are brand new turbines. Why could they not be put to work? Because no gas was supplied to them. Why? The answer to that will cough out other whys.
This is Nigeria. You can ask the same question of our Railways, our Water, and our Telecommunications, he concludes. The answer to our electricity, he asserts, is to be found in all these.
Nigeria with her installed capacity of 6,500 megawatts supplies power to Benin Republic and Niger Republic, yet these two countries do not face the energy problem Nigeria faces. Ghana only recently celebrated 10 years of uninterrupted power! So, again, what is the matter with us?
But I see some solutions:
Firstly, generators in all government offices, including the National Assembly, should be banned, the existing ones auctioned off. If we are to go back to the dark ages that we are steadily degenerating into, we may as well sprint to it – we may need to get there to start finding our way out properly. A government that keeps voting billions to fuel generators for its own comfort cannot have serious commitment to resolving the national power issue.
Secondly, importation of generators into the country should be banned. Perhaps necessity can be the mother of our own invention – and from the darkness, our scientists may invent a “home-grown” technology to harness our God-given energy for the common good.
Thirdly, the restructuring of the country is imperative. Even in the attempt to so-called privatise power, no one, it seems, wants to touch it, not even with a ten-foot pole – not with the present pseudo federation arrangement of the country. A restructured Nigeria may yield that sadly lacking spirit of nationalism.
After all, Yar’Adua may not be the problem – we all are. The power crisis is desperate and calls for drastic actions before real darkness overcomes us all.
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