Power sector was sold to clueless investors, says Saraki
Senate President Bukola Saraki on Tuesday criticised how the power sector was privatised, saying it was sold to individuals who had no idea about how to run it.
He said the mistakes of past governments “borne out of ignorance, selfish interests and fraud”, brought Nigeria to this point.
Saraki said this at a workshop on power sector organised by the national assembly in Abuja.
He lamented that the sector, in spite of the enormous resources committed to it for the last 14 years, had remained in a perilous state.
“Today, we are on the verge of a total systemic breakdown and I see this as an opportunity to stop this train from derailing completely,” he said.
“We sold the discos to individuals and parties who had no idea about running a proper power distribution business. Licenses were issues based on cronyism rather than capital adequacy, market experience and capacity to deliver. Agreements were faulty and transaction integrity hardly imperative.
“This is the opportunity for both the legislature and executive to come together to forge a solution to this perennial problem. We cannot afford to waste the opportunity we have now. We owe it to the people who have entrusted us with the privilege of working out solutions to their problems by electing us to our various offices that we are hard on our heels to bring them solutions not complaints.
“We cannot shy away from the fact that inexcusable mistakes have been made in the past that brought us to this point and we must be willing to face up to them and clearly delineate them in order to ensure that we do not return to the mistakes of the past.
“Clearly some of these where innocent mistakes, others were rather the product of selfish interests, some fraudulent, some born out of ignorance and others glaring lack of capacity apparent from day one. All of these combined has brought us to the mess we now have to face up to.”
Emphasising that the problems in the sector were the country’s own making, the senate president said sacrifice must be made to overcome the challenges.
“Where we are is not an accident. We walked our way into the landmine we are facing with the decisions we made in the past. While privatisation is a right policy recipe to pursue in order to put in place a power sector that can galvanise our economy, we forgot that the participation of the private sector is not an end in itself,” he said.
“We neglected that unless this is done, observing transparency, competition, transaction integrity we might end up with a sector worse than the past. The BPE did things that were inexcusable. To imagine that even the sale proceeds of about $4bn was solely spent towards the payment of pensions and staff. Not one single kobo was expended towards catalysing the sector back to life.
“GENCOS bought generating units without a clear assurance of source of gas to fire plants and government had no active roadmap for delivery of a gas market infrastructure to make this happen. Yet gas companies and the IOCs were exporting our gas out of our shores to create gas markets elsewhere in Europe and Asia while we languished in darkness as a result of incessant, persistent and erratic power outages. In the face of all these our people continued to be called upon to bear inexplicable bills estimated beyond rationale service value.”
Well done Mr Senate President,this is one fact that I see you face in years, may be the Presidency’s slogan of the change begins with me is catching up on my brother Mr. saraki. I can’t agree more with his inside knowledge and honest assessment delivered brilliantly by the senate president. Well, after all said and done with, what next on the implementation?, you said it all, now do it all, by doing all you can to reverse and right what was wrong through greed and mismanagement. Senate president, we are waithing. Please don’t come back to say your hands are tied, you know what is right, do it and the glory will be yours.
Kudos to Mr Senate President. No matter how long the Truth is concealed, it will eventually come to bare some day. Thank God that the Truth is Gradually coming to light. The true fact is that Privatization should have been the Solution to power Problem in the country but it is very sad to note that the company was not PRIVATIZED but rather ceded to the Allies and Cronies of the previous government. Their were more than enough Qualified Firms who have the Technical and and Financial Base to spring the company to a glorious status, but corruption in the land did not give them way. There is no need/benefit counting the mistakes of the past but what matters now is “What is the present government doing to change this ugly situation and alleviate the chronic hardship the citizens have been subject to”? It is not late to make a change since the problem has been identified. The government has a responsibility to take the bull by the horn and ensure that the problem of the power sector is resolved one and for all. It is high time the government understood that no meaningful development can be attained in an economy with dwindling/erratic power supply. The Time to act is now!!!
The solution is to enforce the December 2016 deadline for every consumer to be provided with Pre-paid Meter.
Currently, most of their customers are on estimated billing, which is daylight robbery. So discos can afford to collect for services not rendered.
To make the matter worse, they avoid buying from grid even when there’s generated power available.
If they are forced to provide 100% prepaid meter, to survive, they will be forced to effectively and efficiently distribute power accordingly.
The Senate can begin the correction by forcing a 30-day window for discos to provide prepaid meters to all consumers or lose their licenses.