TheCable

Babatunde Fashola, minister of power, works and housing, says Nigeria is a great country which should not be compared to other countries.

The minister made this statement while answering questions at a workshop on the power sector recovery programme (PSRP).

He said people needed to understand power dynamics before making statements.

“When people say Germany is exporting power, your country is exporting power too. To Niger, to Republic of Benin, to Togo and we are selling gas to the West African region. Stop putting yourself down, we are a great country. We have challenges let us go and deal with them,” he said.

“All of this South Africa has this doesn’t follow just that way. Rwanda as at December 2016 had 208MW, the whole country; barely half of what Abuja DisCo uses.

“Niger is running on 80MW, Republic of Togo 200MW less than Abuja, Ghana is about 3,000MW installed capacity and they are not producing all of that; Lagos alone is getting 1200MW, one state, half of another country. So we must understand the dynamics of electricity use.

“Again, if you read the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan and you read the Power Sector Recovery Programme, when they tell you there are no plans to solve these problems, tell them it is a lie, that they don’t know what they are saying and that there are action points here to deal with the problems.”