Mr. Barth Nnaji, recently appointed by President Jonathan to lead a team on
boosting power supply, said the government alone cannot invest enough to
meet its energy needs.
Nigeria is home to Africa's biggest oil and gas industry but underinvestment
and mismanagement have left its power sector unable to meet demand, leaving
businesses and individuals who can afford it reliant on diesel-powered
generators.
"Access to supply is 40 percent of the population. It should be growing at 6
percent per annum if we want to achieve our objective," Nnaji told a
conference on Nigeria in London.
Successive presidents have pledged to boost Nigeria’s power generation —
which regularly plunges to well below its 3,000 megawatt capacity due to
poor maintenance and mismanagement — but little concrete progress has been
made despite hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for investment.
Lack of a strong regulatory framework, particularly around the tariff
regime, has been a major disincentive to private sector involvement.
However, Mr. Nnaji said he was determined to put in place a framework that
would not be altered each time there was a change in government and create a
competitive, private sector-led power sector within the next five years.
“The agenda of my task force is to see that this reform is driven to a
logical point of no return, so we are not going to have one government come
in and try, then another government come in and stop it,” he said.
He also said one critical step would be to build additional generating
capacity of some 3,000 MW over the next three years adding that, the
government planned to hold a conference in the coming months to discuss
private sector’s involvement in it.
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