1 month ago
3 ARTICLE AD
FILE: National power grid.
Nigeria’s power grid collapsed again on Saturday morning for the third time within a week plunging the entire country into a blackout. Similar events occurred on Monday and Tuesday within 24 hours. The latest episode is the eighth time the national grid has collapsed this year starting from February. It is a continuation of the sordid experiences in recent years. The power grid collapsed 46 times between 2017 and 2023.
For a country with humongous energy sources including 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, a vast network of rivers for hydropower, and abundant sunshine for solar arrays, it is a shame that Nigeria is still struggling to supply one of the most basic elements of modern living. That Nigeria can hardly muster 5000MW for its 220 million citizens 128 years after electricity was first generated underlines the folly of the visionless, inept, corrupt, and self-serving leadership that has afflicted the country for eons.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission blamed Saturday’s grid collapse on a transformer explosion at Jebba. The failure to make the required investment to replace and upgrade aging components of the national power grid – substations, transformers, and lines – guarantees the regularity of such embarrassing incidents.
Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, admitted last Wednesday that the deplorable state of Nigeria’s power infrastructure makes grid collapse, either total or partial, almost inevitable. “It will continue to remain like this until we can overhaul the entire infrastructure. What we do now is to make sure that we manage it,” he had declared.
The problem stems from the confounding neglect and low investment that the electricity sector has been subjected to by successive governments despite rising population and aggregate demand over the years. The Bola Tinubu administration must address this travesty.
President of the African Development Bank, Akinwunmi Adesina noted on Saturday that Nigeria has the highest population of people, about 86 million, living without electricity globally, and that a recent IMF report estimates that Nigeria loses about $29 billion annually or 5.6 percent of its GDP due to a lack of reliable power supply. This is an outrage.
Generators provide 48.6 percent of the electricity consumed by both households and businesses across the country with $16 billion spent annually on fuel per National Bureau of Statistics. About 59 per cent of industries in Nigeria are off the national electricity grid because they do not see the grid as a reliable source of power supply which is why they remain globally uncompetitive amid high energy costs.
Nigeria’s power sector woes are myriad and complex. Inadequate power generation capacity, transmission and distribution bottlenecks, sub-optimal pricing and subsidies, operational inefficiencies of the Distribution Companies as well as regulatory uncertainties and policy inconsistencies top the list.
Privatisation has not delivered the desired results because of the failure to match generation capacity with transmission and distribution.
While the national demand is estimated at 40,000MW, Nigeria has an installed capacity of about 12,522MW but the national grid struggles to provide a little over 4,200MW. Even when grid power peaked at 5,100MW recently, it had to be scaled down by 1,400MW because DisCos rejected the extra load supply because of their weak infrastructure. Yet, Nigerians are forced to pay ridiculous differential electricity tariffs due to the gross inefficiencies in the system.
Efforts to revamp the national grid infrastructure via a deal with Siemens of Germany since 2019 became an unending rigmarole with the Federal Government only promising to commit $800 million in September.
Nigeria’s economic planners should know that without a reliable, adequate, accessible, and affordable electricity supply, lofty projections about economic growth, development, and diversification cannot materialise.
The Tinubu administration must confront the electricity crisis by making adequate budgetary provisions for power sector investment in high-grade infrastructure, smart grids, monitoring, and metering systems instead of relying on loans and handouts from multilateral and bilateral partners.
The N344 billion or 1.2 per cent allocated to the power ministry in the 2024 budget does not show any seriousness in tackling the problem. Tinubu must entrench a policy environment that will boost investors’ confidence to take advantage of the immense opportunities in that sector. The national grid must be decentralised as a matter of urgency. The controversy around cost-reflective tariffs will evaporate if consumers do not have to self-generate power at huge costs.
Nigerians cannot afford to continue living in darkness, grappling with 21st-century basics when the rest of the world has moved on.
