Nigeria Content Online

Nigeria
needs $5 billion annually over the next 10 years in order to achieve
stable power supply in line with the Vision 20:2020.

Barth
Nnaji, special adviser to the president on power and chairman of the
presidential task force on power, said the bulk of this fund would have
to come from the private sector. While applauding the recent effort by
government to privatise the power sector, Mr. Nnaji said, in an
interview at the weekend, in Lagos, that the move will stimulate
private sector interest in the sector.

“We
require foreign investment in this sector, but foreign investors are
skeptical as they have the entire world to invest in. But Nigeria is
now saying, we are going to make the various indices for investment
such that they attract what an investor would be looking for
internationally,” he said.

The
N300 billion intervention fund initiated by the Central Bank for power
and aviation sectors, was to encourage private participation in the
sector.

“It
is good, but it is not enough and it shows the will of government. But
there is a lot more the government is doing in terms of policy
approach,” he added.

He
said Nigeria was ready to get things right this time by carrying out
the reforms, as contained in the Electricity Power Sector Reform Act of
2005.

“A
lot is different this time around. First, this government has produced
a holistic plan on how to drive the reform process to completion. So,
government now has a plan for electricity and includes everything from
generation of the power, transmission of power, to distribution of
power, to the regulatory issues surrounding all these,” he said.

Power reform roadmap

President
Goodluck Jonathan launched the power reform roadmap last week as part
of efforts to revive the sector, which has performed below expectations
over the years. As part of the strategy, the government has
reconstituted the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to
regulate private sector operators in the sector.

“The
Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission will, therefore, be
undertaking a major review of the tariff regime, which will be
completed before the end of the first quarter of 2011, with a view to
replacing the national uniform tariff with a new genuinely
cost-reflective ceiling on end-user tariffs,” said Mr. Jonathan at the
launch in Lagos.

Mr.
Nnaji, a professor of robotics engineering and a former science and
technology minister, said one of the challenges of the sector was the
inefficiency that has made it difficult to achieve optimum output.
While installed power plants have capacity in the region of 5,000
megawatts, only about 3,500 megawatts is available on the national
grid.

“Sometimes,
you have available generation but you are not able to evacuate it due
to the network platform. What we would like to have as government is
for the actual capacity to match installed capacity,” Mr. Nnaji said.

All
these, he said, will be corrected with the involvement of the private
sector. He, however, refused to give a definite timeline on when
Nigerians would begin to enjoy stable power supply. “I will not give
you data, but you will begin to see improvement. We will continue to
see improvement. It is better to see improvement than promise and get
disappointed,” he said.

He added that competent management of the sector will eventually translate to improvement in power supply.