About a week ago, I ran into an old friend, a classmate at Command Children School, Ojo, Lagos. She is one of the three primary school friends that I have kept in touch with since our graduation about four decades ago. We lost contact in between and reconnected on Facebook.
Back then, Bisola was an average pupil who aspired for the very best and only made friends with the most brilliant people in class. So, I was not surprised when she told me that she got married to a medical doctor who passed on in January 2009, 10 years after their wedding.
Armed with a good Bachelor of Science degree in Banking and Finance from a state university in the South-West, she had picked one of the two plum banking job offers she got with one of the top new generation banks immediately after her national youth service. She was doing very well for herself and could carry on with the responsibility of taking care of their three children when her husband passed, but for the global financial crisis that, soon after that, washed away the family’s source of income.
The bank she worked for was hit by the full disclosure sledgehammer of the Central Bank of Nigeria in August 2009. She was one of the over 10,000 bankers and other workers who joined the pool of 10 million Nigerians who were already unemployed as of March 2009, according to data by the National Bureau of Statistics. I did not know about this predicament because we lost contact at about this time.
I couldn’t help but burst into tears when we were reunited at an event in Abeokuta, my hometown, during the recent Eid-el-Fitr holidays. She told me how she struggled to cater alone for her family since her husband’s demise through loans that she managed to apply judiciously. To cut this pathetic story short, she was hit by a major disaster two weeks ago. She had a thriving frozen foods business at Sango Ota, in Ogun State, which she said had been affected by Nigeria’s persistent power crisis as well as the recent increase in petrol price. She was still grappling with losses associated with these when a bigger disaster occurred.
She could not control her tears as she narrated how, either through an act of sabotage or bad luck, she lost about N20m worth of goods during a 48-hour blackout. Her diesel generator unexpectedly developed a fault at the same time, and the smaller generators could not power all the freezers in the store. It was a harrowing challenge that has left her family in serious debt and hardship.
My friend’s case is just one out of the very many cases of avoidable losses across Nigeria, owing to power supply that has remained epileptic for as long as I have known how to read and write! It is really pathetic that citizens who quietly become their own Federal Government by providing the basic amenities needed for a functional life are still being haunted by the ghosts of leadership inefficiency.
Recently, frustrated Nigerians in many parts of the country took to the streets to protest “months of erratic power supply despite rising tariffs”. Small and medium enterprise owners have also continued to lament their heavy reliance on petrol and diesel generators, which have pushed up operating costs and forced some of them out of business.
It is a shame that after many years of democracy, Nigerian politicians have continued to make power sector reform the fulcrum of election campaigns but have continued to fail woefully despite over N7tn estimated to have been spent on the sector since 2013.
More worrisome is the fact that the same set of politicians come back, cap in hand, begging the same electorate for votes, after a four-year documented failure, with power still occupying a ‘Top 2’ position on the promise chart.
Failed promises did not start today. Nigeria has consistently faced the challenge of a lack of political will to remove known obstacles in the way of stable power supply, and by extension, economic growth.
From late Bola Ige in 1999 to late Segun Agagu, Olu Agunloye, Liyel Imoke, all under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, to Rilwan Babalola, under late President Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria graduated to the era of professors under former President Goodluck Jonathan, with the appointments of Prof. Barth Nnaji as Minister of Power in 2011 and Prof. Chinedu Nebo in 2013.
The country’s power sector, however, defied academic, research or lecture room logic as the two professors, despite privatisation, left the sector almost worse off with under-capitalised distribution companies, tariff disputes and lingering liquidity crisis, all under the umbrella of corruption in high places and abuse of office.
Then came a former Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, whose appointment was greeted with applause, having worked so hard for a widely acclaimed “performer badge” as governor. Like others before him, he promised to fix bottlenecks and improve the power supply considerably. Though analysts agreed that some transmission projects were completed during his tenure, it is on record that the persistent grid failures, lingering tariff controversies and gas constraints, among others, splashed enough red oil on his white garment until he passed the baton to Saleh Mamman in 2019.
Mamman’s tenure ended in controversy in 2021 with a N33.8bn corruption allegation hanging on his neck. His successor did not do better, even though no corruption case has surfaced for now.
We are in the third year of the President Bola Tinubu administration, yet the high hope at the beginning is fast waning. If all that the first-class degree of the current Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, and his experience as a former CBN deputy governor, as chairman, board of directors of the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System, among others, can produce for him is the social media title: “Olokunkun of Okunkun kingdom”, then this administration needs to urgently rethink the strategies around power sector reforms in line with current realities.
A few weeks ago, the Nigerian Independent System Operator said power generation had dropped to an average of 4,300 megawatts due to inadequate gas supply to thermal power plants. It is sad that this dismal generation capacity, which has not really improved beyond this level for many years, can barely light a bulb for each individual in a country with a population of about 240 million, much less jumpstart a grandiose quest for a $1tn economy by 2030.
The truth here is that Nigeria does not have to send delegations to other African countries or even advanced economies to know what to do. The expertise is here, the brains are here, and all the arguments have been exhausted. Political will and growth-inhibiting corruption are the main hurdles to be crossed. All President Tinubu needs to do, as the first step in the nation’s search for a lasting solution, apart from the audit of the current investments in the power sector, is to fish out the real enemies of progress and cripple them. The President knows them. He also knows that this is a peculiar mess (penkelemesi) that is beyond the current minister.
By Yemi Kolapo