The Secretary-General, National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE) and Deputy President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Joe Ajaero, in an interview with the Punch Newspapers, stated that the aims of the privatisation of the public utilities have failed, and the government cannot continue subsiding the private sector.
He stated that more than 42% of Nigerians are without electricity access. ”It is an understatement to say that 80 million do not have access to electricity because I don’t know the demographics used to assess that. Nigeria is generating 4,000 megawatts, and the global index is a million people for 1000 megawatts, and the people that fall under that are classified as suffering from power poverty. Now, if we take four million people by the global index, you take 4,000 megawatts for four million people, what we would be having is 196 million people who don’t have what we call personal access to electricity”, Ajaero said.
On government interventions in the power sector, Ajaero said, despite several interventions, the sector is still not viable. ”Now, coming to the issue of funds spent, it brings us to another lane. At a time, the Obasanjo government was said to have spent over $16bn on trying to revive electricity. Then globally, with $1bn, you could get 1000 megawatts. That money could have ordinarily given Nigeria 16,000 megawatts assuming we did not have any pole, line or anything”, he said.
”Now, after privatisation, the Federal Government of Nigeria has pumped in as grants about N1.5tn given to the private sector. You sold your house, and you are giving the person money to paint it; N1.5tn no matter how we think of it could have given us over 20,000 megawatts”, Ajaero added.
Speaking on metering, Ajaero questioned why the Federal Government continues to fund the Distribution projects. He stated that before privatisation, one of the requirements for the bidding process was technical capacity, and so far, the Distribution Companies (DisCos) have failed in that regard. ”People came on a very deceptive note and took over. Why would the government equally give them money after giving them N1.5tn? The government is equally giving them money to buy meters? These same people took loans from Nigerian banks to buy Nigerian electricity. It is like portfolio investors. That mass metering project up till now is not working. I happen to have visited some of the indigenous metering companies. Some of the distribution companies that were allocated some portions have not even gone there to collect them because they are making more money through estimation”, he said.