Still On Power Outage (II)

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo laid the
groundwork for the privatization of the nation’s power industry;  former President Goodluck Jonathan built on the foundation and handed the generation and distribution arms of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to the Gencos and Discos to end Nigeria’s eternal darkness.  Unfortunately, they plunged Nigeria into a deeper darkness than the PHCN.
Some of the Discos are so delinquent that even when there is power from the Gencos, they would not buy it for onward distribution to consumers. The reason is that the distribution equipment is archaic and frail. Most of the transformers are 25 years old.  They cannot stand 15 hours of constant power supply. Some of the distribution cables are even older.  They snap under the pressure of constant power supply.
The power distribution firms have myriads of excuses for not being able to distribute the little the Gencos pass to them.  Discos are either too broke or stingy to invest in distribution equipment.  They would rather refuse to buy available power for distribution because they would all file for bankruptcy if they have to depend on revenue from power supplied to consumers.  They rather halted the supply of prepared meters the day they took over from PHCN.
At the end of the month, business managers are given impossible fraudulent bills in the name of estimated bills, on consumers who use the ancient analogue meters.  They also use extortionists’ fee derisively tagged, “fixed charges”. NERC has colluded with the Discos and has refused to build the fixed charges into electricity tariff by way of an increase.   With the fixed charges still treated as levy, any Discos with one million customers rakes in N750 million monthly without supplying even a kilo watt hour of electricity to consumers.
For government to bring us out of this miry clay, it must beware of political friends who during the period of electioneering rendered one help or the other, who will want to have such jobs to do to cushen their effects.  The government will also face the problems of lack of technical experts, lack of the knowledge of local energy requirement, lack of skilled indigenes to install, operate and maintain the equipment and lack of spare parts.
There should be massive deployment of renewable energy system which has a great future should the right political and legislative framework be put in place.
There should be developmental communication, a system whereby the people of the nation will be part and parcel of this great vision.  The project should be socially accepted to forestall the activities of vandals.
Youths of every area should be harnessed to ensure the safety of these gadgets and the government should not be stingy towards such youths. “If you want to catch   the rat, you must use the cat”.
Renewable energy funding/financing agencies like that of the Indian Renewable Energy Agency (IREDA) should be established.  Entrepreneurial and Managerial skills developmental training programmes and technical courses should be initiated with a view to developing energy service companies.
Research centres should be built where we can actually buy the technologist and not the services of the foreign experts alone in Nigeria, research centres or rather research itself is not valued.  The advanced countries make their policies based on research findings and it goes well with them, while we envy them. Professionals are kept in research institutes to proffer solutions to societal problems such as the one we are suffering from and their findings are used to make policies.
In America, for instance, Shale oil has been discovered decades ago, but their inability to produce it made them one of our biggest patrons in our crude oil sales, but they have pumped money into research and were able to break the camel’s back, thereby distancing themselves from our crude oil.
During his campaign for the U .S. presidency, Barak Obama promised a comprehensive energy programme that would reduce America’s dependence on carbon-based fuels, including oil, thereby lessening the U. S. economy’s dependency on imported crude as well as contributing to CO2 emissions reduction.
In April 13, 2009, Steven Chu, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1997, clearly articulated the President’s vision in the issue of Newsweek, under the heading, “Pulling the plug on oil”. Stated the U.S. path to energy independence and in March, the oil billionaire appeared with several U.S. congressmen in Washington to introduce the NAT GAS Act of 2009, to provide for immediate incentives and long term stability to expand the use of domestic fuels and to replace imported carbon-based transportation fuels such as oil, diesel and gasoline.
Nigeria, should borrow a lift from America.  The time to please political friends has passed. It is now time to please the people; because power truly belongs to the people and now the people are aware that power actually belongs to them. If this government is able to do this, it will be considered the legendary government of our time.
Concluded.
Ikiesikimama is an intern with The Tide

Iyeneomi Ikiensikimama