Nigeria will need to generate 120,000 megawatts of electricity before it can be considered an industrialised nation, a professor of Energy Economics, Department of Economics, University of Ibadan, Prof. Adeola Adenikinju, has said.
Adenikinju, who also doubles as the President, Nigerian Association for Energy Economics, said this while announcing the association’s sixth international annual conference in Lagos, on Tuesday.
According to him, it is rather a show of mediocrity for the country to be generating less than 4,000MW of electricity for a population of more than 150 million people.
He said, “When I was a Special Assistant to the Special Adviser to the President on Energy during the President Olusegun Obasanjo regime, I was a member of a group mandated to come up with the power requirement for Nigeria in order to be an industrialised country by 2030. And when we did the analysis, we found that for Nigeria to be an industrialised country by 2030, at least the country would need to be able to generate 120,000MW of electricity.
“The vision was that around 2007, we would have had 10,000MW, now we are still around 4,000.”
Power generation in Nigeria has always been between 3,000MW to 4,000MW.
This, however, suffered a significant drop from a peak of 4,517 megawatts attained on December 21, 2012 to 3,443MW on Tuesday. As at April 16, 2012, peak generation was still 3,709.1MW.
Adenikinju, who noted that this would not even be enough to power a state in the United States, said it was unfortunate that Nigeria had failed to meet the 10,000MW despite the fact that the country required 120,000MW to leapfrog into an industrialised economy.
He argued that though the power sector reform had recorded significant milestone with the ongoing sale of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria’s successor companies, the same could not be said of the oil and gas industry.
He said, “Since we started on the path of reform, there has been some progress that we can see. We have the privatisation of the successor companies of PHCN and we also have some independent power producers coming into the industry.
“I will not say that we have achieved the same measure of progress in oil and gas. We seem to have moved a little bit faster in the electricity reform than oil & gas and that is understandable because oil and gas continue to generate a lot of passion in Nigeria.”
Speaking generally on the slow pace of the energy sector reforms in the country, the NAEE president argued that the government, to a large extent, lacked the political will to drive though energy reforms.
While blaming this on vested interests, the energy economics professor, said, “The special interests have resisted the reforms in the oil and gas and electricity sector. It is because some of them are well connected thereby slowing down the reforms and in some cases reversing the measures.”
He also said the Federal Government had failed to carry Nigerians along on its energy reforms, saying that had led to some resistance by the people.
He said, “For instance, for government to implement a policy like the subsidy removal of 2012, there must be some confidence-building measures that must have preceded the implementation. That was not sufficiently done last year and that was why Nigerians resisted. Though many Nigerians see the sense in the removal of fuel subsidy, Nigerians resisted because government’s policies were not properly articulated.”
Adenikinju also attributed the delay in energy reforms in the country to lack of consensus in the government to drive through the reforms. “I also think the reformers lack support from the highest level of government possible,” he added.
He decried the dearth of data in the country, saying policies were made in Nigeria based on intuition and not data-driven guidance.
“We also need sufficient evidence (research) to back up our policies. We don’t have data or evidence that is needed to effectively guide the energy policy reforms in Nigeria,” he asserted.
Generally, Adenikinju said the myriad political and economic issues were hindering the reforms, insisting that all stakeholders were not carried along.
“Nigerians are not properly informed about the reforms,” he maintained.
He said, “’Transparency and accountability are also lacking in the reforms. Transparency, openness, and accountability are critical ingredients for the reforms to be successful. Everybody needs to know that there are no shady deals. There have been a lot of policy reversals in the government. Government has not kept to the timeline it has set for itself in the reforms and when this happens, there will be credibility gap and investors will lose confidence.”
The Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, had recently told Nigerians to expect more power cuts in the days ahead due to ongoing maintenance work on installations across the country.
Nebo had said the country lost 1,112 megawatts of generated electricity in two days due to the shutdown of the Chevron gas plant.
“From time to time, there is going to be shutdown and it happened two times recently between Benin and Osogbo. If you don’t shut down these plants in order to have a safe restarting process, you are going to lose the equipment. Once routine maintenance is done, the process of restarting the machines that were shut down takes some time,” he said.
