By Harry Awurumibe, Editor Abuja Bureau
Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, has been explaining why the country’s electricity supply has been abysmal in the recent time, just as he disclosed that the collapsed national grid has been recovered.
The Minister who addressed State House Correspondents at the Presidential Villa, Abuja on Wednesday after the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting argued that government did not envisage that the country will have issues around vandalization of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) pipelines.
According to Aliyu: “The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go to maintenance.
“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalization of pipelines which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidently everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations. It is a combination of many factors. That compounded the problem we are having on the grid.
“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are trying to get more mega watts to push on the grid. We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more mega watts to put on the grid. Basically, the problem around gas.
“You need to have gas contract between generating companies and gas supplies- some are form contracts, some are not. We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in some few days to mature.
“We have capacity of 8,000 mega watts – the one on the grid, imbedded and captive. If you combine all of them, you will get these problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge and very soon, we will come out of it.
“We have gotten approval now of N5billion from FEC to open up and expand – Lagos/Ogun where presently, they may not be enjoying quality electricity. We need to do this more.”