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Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Infrastructure, Mr. Ahmad Zakari, has identified ills that have stalling the needed progress in the nation’s power sector.
He identified three major classes of challenges as regulatory, fiscal and infrastructural.
He lamented that for several years, the country had a situation where distribution companies were buying power at high prices but were only allowed to sell at low prices by the government.
He expressed that the current administration has gone far to correct the inefficiency by introducing the service-based tariff despite the regulatory gap which created an investment quagmire wherein any investor who put in money wasn’t able to recover it.
He added that the administration has worked out how it will push more infrastructure into the network, starting from the National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP), through the emergency intervention from the central bank, commercial banks and donor partners.
This was in addition to the incremental support from Siemens and other programmes, amounting to about $3 billion actively being spent and would be spent over the next 24 months.
He disclosed that in 2015, there were 28 total or partial collapses, while as of last year there were four , noting that in 2021, Nigeria has had one partial and one total collapse.
He added:“There’s a plan to invest in SCADA, which is the system that digitally manages the grid. It allows you to monitor all of the figures and voltage and whenever there are challenges it can isolate the problematic segment”.
He spoke on controversial tariff adjustment in the country, noting that the statute allows tariff to be tampered with every six months.
He regretted that the development has not been fully communicated with the public even though any time it is done, it is viewed as tariff increase by the masses.
He stated that the federal government has continued to encourage local meter manufacturers, who have already delivered in excess of 500,000 to 600,000 meters in phase zero of the scheme, out of which 400,000 have been installed.
According to him,the national mass metering programme has delivered more meters to Nigerians in four months than what was done in 18 months under the entire Meter Asset Provider (MAP) programme and expressed confidence that the six million metering target will be met.
He said through the service-based tariff regime, new grounds were being broken as the Discos collected N65 billion in December 2020, leading to a 15 per cent increase in delivery of power even before the commencement of capital expenditure.
“So, we are seeing increased liquidity in the system that is likely to continue. The Siemens programme is part of the suite of investments that make up the $3-$5 billion that we are targeting over the next 24 months,” he said.
He noted that despite the improvements, there’s still a lot of gap to be filled and massive investments to be made in the entire value chain of the power sector.
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