By Williams Amofokhai
Bola Tinubu, President of West African nation of Nigeria is upbeat that his government will banish all obstacles crippling stable electricity supply in the country.
Nigeria, with a population of over 200 million cannot boast of supply 7,000 megawatts of electricity due to serious obstacles working against the system.
But its president said on Friday that he would bring solutions to the multifarious challenges across the electric power sector value chain which will significantly relieve longstanding problems of suppressed demand and improve the steadiness of peak supply for Nigerians.
His view is is that improved energy generation and distribution is an imperative for accelerated national growth.
Tinubu spoke at the ground breaking ceremony of the new 350MW Gwagwalada Independent Thermal Power Plant (Phase 1) where he urged the NNPCL and its partners to deliver the landmark project within the promised three years completion timeline, insisting that, “three years must be three years.”
“Although the Nigeria Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) is currently characterized by huge supply-gap deficits owing to dilapidated power infrastructure and poor distributions networks, amongst others, this administration is poised to address every power value chain challenge that will significantly relieve the suppressed demand, enhance generation, and improve national peak growth & sustainability far above the hitherto abysmal and unacceptable 5,300MW for over 200 million Nigerians,” he said.
He is of the view that a swift improvement in the stability and quantum of energy supply would enhance national economic development, which remains a cardinal priority of his administration.
“During my electioneering campaign, I made a commitment to Nigerians on providing stable electricity. This is to be achieved by ensuring that we use all available energy sources to boost power generation beyond the current installed capacity of 12,000 megawatts, strengthening the integrity of our transmission infrastructure and ensuring that all distribution bottlenecks are removed.
“We can not form the productive and industrialised economy we need in order to conclusively tackle poverty, and create thousands of high paying manufacturing jobs for our teeming young people, whose creativity and talent we must harness for national development, without reliable electricity,” the president stated.
According to him, adequate energy, broadly, and electricity, specifically, is to be treated as the topmost national economic imperative, if Nigeria must develop and maximise her human and natural resources, stating that “to accelerate our economic growth, we must work hard to remove every obstacle that has slowed down our progress. I have often said that electricity is the greatest human invention of the last 1,000 years.
“We cannot advance and join the rest of the developed world if we remain stuck with our current electricity supply situation and unable to supply the energy our country requires to power a doubling of the size of our Gross Domestic Product within the next decade.”
