Penultimate Tuesday, not a few Nigerians woke up to the news that President Muhammadu Buhari had ordered the sack of the managers of Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) following a strike by its workers over non-remittance of the firm’s counterpart contribution to their retirement savings for nearly two years, among other grievances.
This action by the local branch of the National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE) was said to have resulted in power outage in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Niger, Kogi, Nasarawa, and parts of Kaduna and Edo States for close to 14 hours before some federal government officials intervened to reassure the workers on efforts to resolve the matter within 21 days.
A number of power sector experts had swiftly reacted to the presidential directive, calling it an overzealous meddlesomeness that was capable of sending wrong signals to existing and potential investors in the sector. Of particular note was the former Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), Dr Sam Amadi, who said that the president lacked the power to sack the authorities of a firm in which the government held a minority 40 per cent stake.
The trailing avalanche of criticisms may have prompted the Presidency to issue a rebuttal on Wednesday in which it claimed that Buhari never directed and was not inclined to authorise the sacking of the management board of AEDC or any private organisation for that matter. Power Minister, Abubakar Aliyu, who had been quoted in an earlier statement as confirming the president’s directive to BPE, would later clarify that the board reconstitution was rather at the behest of UBA Plc following a loan repayment default by AEDC.
Electricity crisis has been with this country since the early post-Independence era when the utility was managed by the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN). And as if the name had anything to do with its persistent woes, the giant monopoly was later christened the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) in the 1970s which simple, yet notorious acronym has remained on the lips of Nigeria’s electricity consumers to this day.
Even the NEPA name would later morph into Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) on July 1, 2005 following the power sector reform act which saw to the establishment of several Independent Power Projects (IPPs) across the land by the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration from 1999. But considering the humongous dollar sum touted to have been expended on these undertakings, with no significant alteration in the dire power situation, electricity consumers began to demand an unbundling of PHCN.
This call was answered in 2013 when President Goodluck Jonathan’s regime split the electricity behemoth into seven generation companies (GenCos), 11 distribution firms (DisCos), one transmission outfit (TCN), an electricity trading firm (Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc), with NERC serving as the industry’s regulator.
With this, Nigerians had heaved a sigh of relief while believing that there would be a radical departure from past experiences as was witnessed in the communications industry with the arrival of telecoms outfits like Econet, MTN, Etisalat and Glo, among others. What many did not realise at the time was that, unlike the telecoms industry where a consumer can easily port between network providers, the power sector has no such room for migration from one DisCo to another. This means that an electricity consumer is practically stuck with the distribution firm operating in his place of residence.
The power companies have, therefore, brazenly presented their hapless customers with outrageous monthly bills – aided by NERC which keeps raising electricity tariffs every other quarter without regard to the poor service delivery by these firms. What’s more, the power firms had often blamed the power shortfall and high bills on unreliable gas supply, accumulated debts by military formations and MDAs, energy theft mainly occasioned by meter bypass, and rising dollar cost of facility retooling.
Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and a number of other West African countries are said to be far better off in terms of access to reliable electricity supply. It was even advanced as one of the reasons firms like Dunlop and Michelin left Nigeria for Ghana. Indeed, it was once circulated that a power firm in Ghana, GRIDCO, celebrated 10 years of its stable supply of electricity to the country.
But this is not to say that the former Gold Coast does not have its own share of prolonged outages. Between 2012 and 2016 the country reportedly suffered its worst erratic power supply, prompting consumers to stage protests in the country’s major cities over what they called Dumsor (translated as ‘off and on’ in the local Akan language); while down here, all we do is to mutter ‘bring and take’ with listless resignation.
As at last year, it was reported that 85 per cent of Ghana’s population had access to electricity; making it one of the very few African nations tipped to most likely attain 100 per cent universal access by 2030. The bottom line here is that Ghana has managed its power supply system far better than Nigeria such that we may need to consider hiring some experienced Ghanaian engineers and energy administrators to come overhaul our power supply and billing system.
There really should be no shame in doing this. After all, the British did hire a Canadian and former governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr Mark Carney, to head the Bank of England for seven years, from 2013 to 2020. Or was a Nigerian jurist, Emmanuel Fagbenle, not appointed Chief Justice of The Gambia between 2015 and 2017?
We surely need to be rescued from our hopeless power generation and supply situation. And I don’t care if such rescuers come from Ghana or wherever.

By: Ibelema Jumbo