Nigeria Loses N100bn Monthly to Power Outages

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Nigeria Loses N100bn Monthly to Power Outages

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Story Filed: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 12:44 AM EST

Lagos (Post Express, August 21, 2000) - Nigeria loses a whopping $1 billion (N100 billion) monthly to frequent outages in the country, the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises, Mallam Nasir Ahmed El-Rufai, has said. Conversely, about N23 billion has been spent in the past 10 years in the importation of generators.

El-Rufai, speaking in Abuja at the just concluded workshop on Electric Power Policy for Nigeria, said the country has the lowest energy consumption per capita in the world, and the citizens enjoy an average of 6 hours of electricity supply daily. He said that though Nigeria has an installed power capacity of 5,600 megawatts (MW) only about 30 per cent of this is available, rotating between 1,500 - 1,900 mw.

Only 35 per cent of the population enjoy electricity. The BPE DG who catalogued the advantages of A Privatised Nigerian Power Sector, said a survey carried out in 1991 by the Technical Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation (TCPC), the forerunner of BPE and the National Council on Privatisation (NCP) showed that unreliable infrastructure increases capital investment cost by at least 25 per cent.

El-Rufai said the country got to this present predicament because of government poor investment in the power sector. According to him, since 1987 no new 330KV and 132KV lines have been added to the transmission grid while no major rehabilitation has been, embarked upon in all the three aspects of generation transmission and distribution since 1990 till April 2000.

All these he attributed to the absence of a well-articulated national electric power policy and associated regulatory framework, fiscal and other incentives. The vision envisaged in a privatised power sector, he said, include a 24 hour non-stop power supply to, at least, 85 per cent of the population, availability of choice from different electricity generators while wasteful spending on the procurement of private generators, spare parts for repairs would be eliminated.

Apart from these, he said the country expects to reap from new electricity supply markets in distribution and marketing in the area of employment opportunities, share ownership of numerous electricity companies on the domestic and international stock exchanges, competitive environment deploying advanced cost-effective technologies and export of up to 40,000 mw to ECOWAS sub-region an North Africa. Electricity tariffs are also expected due to competition between generating companies.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 22, 2000


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