The Nigerian Association for Energy Economics (NAEE) has decried the low level of power generation in the country, saying the current 4,000 MW of electricity generated and distributed to Nigerians daily can even barely power Lagos alone.
The President of the Association, Yinka Omorogbe, said at a pre-conference briefing of NAEE in Abuja that Nigeria still treats power like an elite product and stated that the country generated the least electricity in the world.
Omorogbe explained that the power situation is even worse now than it was in the past.
“The electricity sector in Nigeria is nothing to write home about, and it’s one of the worst in the world. The truth of the matter is that we have generally not done things in a holistic fashion.
“If you are talking about electricity within any country, you have to be talking about electricity for everybody and every type of industry. We don’t. When we’re talking about electricity, we’re almost treating it like an elite product and thinking of it as what we give to urban people.
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“Everybody has to have it. It’s not like right now in Nigeria, where everybody has a generator. That should not be so. In other countries, for instance, England, they will apologize to you. If for any reason the light goes off for a time, they will bring you a generator, and that generator will be utilized in your area,” she stressed.
She argued that Nigeria must improve its grid system and work on establishing mini-grids and other stand-alone, isolated renewable solutions to avoid the frequency of erratic power supply in the country.
“Blackouts are supposed to be timed. But when you’re talking about an abysmally small amount of electricity, it’s difficult. I mean, you’re talking about 4,000 megawatts, which is not enough for Lagos, let alone talking about the whole of Nigeria.
“If you’re talking about a country that says it will increase electricity and they say we will have 20,000 MW in a few years’ time, that’s ridiculous. We’re talking about a country that needs more than that.
“We’re talking about a country that needs electricity to power its industries. There is no industry that is functioning in Nigeria without its own generators.
“So in the first place, we’ve never even gotten it right about how much electricity we need. And then we’ve never even planned to be able to have enough electricity for everybody. Arguably, we can actually say it’s probably worse now than it was before,” she maintained.
(omayowa@globalfinancialdigest.com; Newsroom: +234 8033 964 138
