It is very disheartening that in 2024, the provision of a stable electricity supply remains a political campaign rhetoric. Nigeria is a laughing stock of the global community as a country whose citizens rely on different sizes and shapes of private electricity generators to power their homes and businesses. Billions of dollars of investments in the power sector have only yielded a mere 4,500 megawatts of public electricity supply. All the various reforms including privatisation of electricity generation and distribution haven’t impacted positively on the electricity supply chain. Even the payment of subsidies to power distribution companies has not made electricity readily available to consumers.

Nigeria at present has 27 electricity generating companies popularly called GenCos and 11 power distribution companies better known as DisCos and they include Abuja, Benin, Eko, Enugu, Ibadan, Ikeja, Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Port Harcourt and Yola DisCos. The Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, recently disclosed that the Federal Government is subsidising the electricity bills of consumers nationwide by about 65 per cent.

Quite unfortunately, despite the widespread blackout and the worsening state of electricity supply in Nigeria, the recent figures on the daily load summary of power distribution companies indicate that the firms failed to distribute about 1,769.91 megawatts of electricity between February 1 and 14, 2024. According to the March 5, 2024 edition of this newspaper, “Findings revealed that some distribution companies were deliberately not taking up power supply from the Transmission Company of Nigeria while some power lines were also damaged by vandals in Abuja, Benin, Port Harcourt and Ibadan regions.”

There are myriads of challenges facing Nigeria’s electricity sector. There is the problem of vandalism of electricity installations including transmission lines and cables.  newspaper of March 26, 2024, reported that between January 2022 and March 2024, 117 transmission towers have been vandalised by unscrupulous elements. It cost the TCN N110m to repair each of the vandalised towers. Poor wheeling capacity and grid collapse have kept the transmission of electricity below 4, 500MW. Meanwhile, over $7bn was borrowed by the immediate past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to fix the transmission infrastructure. Can sabotage be ruled out of these acts of vandalism?

Aside from this, the Federal Government owes gas suppliers and electricity-generating companies huge sums of money. Likewise, customers – government ministries, departments and agencies, hospitals, military institutions and individuals – owe distribution companies billions of naira. On Monday, February 19, 2024, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company threatened to disconnect the electricity supply to the Presidential Villa and 86 Federal Government’s MDAs over N47.195bn outstanding debts as of December 2023. Some of the affected MDAs are Chief of Defence Staff – Barracks and military formations owing N12bn, the Federal Capital Territory ministry, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of State Petroleum, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Agriculture.

Others are the Federal Inland Revenue Service, Ministry of Education, Central Bank of Nigeria, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Budget and National Planning, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Interior, Head ECOWAS, and Ministry of Transport, among others. Furthermore, the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company better known as IBEDC has disconnected electricity supply to the University College Hospital, Ibadan thrice this year alone over N495m debt.

Other challenges being faced by DisCos include energy theft whereby unscrupulous customers bypass meters and connect their high-electricity consuming devices such as air-conditioners and cookers directly without any meter reading. On the part of the electricity consumers, they still face the problem of estimated billings for homes, offices and businesses without pre-paid meters. Supply of pre-paid meters has been tardy even as customers pay exorbitant fees for what was initially meant to be supplied to them for free. Clearing faults is not prompt as many technical staff members of distribution companies demand bribes before coming around to clear faults at the transformers or electricity poles. SERVICOM does not exist in the lexicon of DisCos. Every opportunity to exploit customers is explored.

Corruption from top to bottom is one of the major afflictions of Nigeria’s electricity sector. Early this month, President Bola Tinubu suspended indefinitely the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the Rural Electrification Agency, Ahmad Salihijo, alongside three executive directors of the agency. The president also ordered a wider investigation into the conduct of the officials in “a fraudulent mis-expenditure amounting to over N1.2bn over the past two years, some of which has already been recovered by anti-graft agencies.”

If Nigeria is not doing well in the supply of public electricity to her citizens, she’s in a good company. Most African countries are similarly performing woefully. My research shows that Africa has 18 per cent of the world’s population, but just 3 per cent of the world’s electricity generation. However, South Africa and Ghana are the shining lights. According to the Ministry of Mineral Resources and Energy, South Africa’s total domestic electricity generation capacity is 58,095MW from all sources.  The total installed capacity for existing plants in Ghana is 5,134 MW, with a dependable capacity of 4,710 MW. Thermal generation accounts for the largest share of Ghana’s power generation, representing 66 per cent, with hydro accounting for 33 per cent.  Ghana exports power to Togo, Benin, and Burkina Faso.

What are the likely impacts of the lack of public electricity supply? The first is the exponential increase in the cost of doing business. With petrol selling at about N700 per litre and diesel at about N1,500, it costs a lot more to run factories, industries and even small-scale businesses on power-generating sets. Doing so will make the cost of goods and services to be expensive. The noise pollution generated by private electricity generating sets and the carbon monoxide fumes emitted from the exhaust pipes of these devices pollute the environment and have killed many people who operate these devices in ill-ventilated enclosures.

Epileptic electricity supply has prevented many wives from making bulk purchases as their fridges and freezers lack electricity to power them to preserve items meant for storage. In this heat period, many people are suffering from heat rashes and meningitis due to lack of electricity to power their air conditioners and fans. It’s quite frustrating when there is no public electricity supply. This is because most Information Communication Technology and electronic gadgets are powered by electricity thus, once there is no electricity to power them, they are just like a piece of monuments.

Tinubu and his Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu (grandson of the maverick politician, Adegoke Adelabu of Penkelemes fame in Ibadan), should do all they can to deliver a stable electricity supply to Nigerians because there lies the key to unlock Nigeria’s economic growth and development. I do hope taking electricity from exclusive to concurrent legislative list and other legal reforms recently initiated by President Tinubu will yield positive results.

:@jideojong