I pass my neighbour 3 times

I pass my neighbour 3 times

By Clem Oluwole

I have three generating sets in my custody. And I am not proud about the status. Believe me! Generator is a necessity in this part of the divide. I was bitten by the genset bug about a decade ago. I just needed a small set to power the house and watch the teevee anytime the almighty NEPA (now PHCN), which has power over light and darkness in Nigeria, chose to avoid my neighbourhood. Then I began to upgrade as power situation deteriorated.

Two years ago, I went for a higher capacity generator… a 2.9 kva Sumec product. I actually wanted Thermocool stuff but it was out of stock. So, I settled for Sumec which was the type my next door neighbour had been using for God knows when and it has served him well. But unfortunately for me, I went for the fake one. The decision to go for a bigger set was informed by the desire to sustain preservation of perishable stuffs in the fridge or deep freezer when power supply became very, very erratic in the estate where I reside in Kubwa, Abuja.

After about 50 hours of electricity supply, the fake set began to misbehave. After spending about N20, 000 fixing the machine, I lost faith in its performance and decided to ditch it. Then I went for the original Thermocool… a 2.0 capacity which has been serving me well. I have asked my technician to look for a buyer for the Sumec, still in a serviceable condition, but he has not been able to find one. That is how I came to be saddled with the three generators.

Now, the question is how did we come this far with this power mess? I was old enough to appreciate the performance of the defunct Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) which metamorphosed into NEPA in the 70s. The population of Nigeria must be hovering around 60 million or thereabouts at that time. And the country solely relied on hydro source to power its electricity supply. The Kainji Dam, now suffering neglect, played a major role at that time. You could be sure of between 15 and 20 hours of electricity output daily in many parts of the country. Then, we began to grow but our power infrastructure regressed. No thanks to rudderless leadership. Eventually, electricity demand outstripped supply and NEPA transformed into Never Expect Power Always or National Electric Powerless Authority, depending on your mood.

Power is the prime mover of the economy. It is the bedrock of industrialisation. A country that is deficit of this critical infrastructure will continue to grope in the dark as Nigeria is currently doing. And as NEPA continued to live up to its redefinition of Never Expect Power Always, President Olusegun Obasanjo renamed it on April 15, 2005, to become what is now known as Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). It was a deliberate policy to decentralise and deregulate the problematic sector. When the change of identity did not produce any better results, electricity-starved Nigerians found a new meaning for PHCN – Please, Hold your Candle Now.

When Obasanjo emerged on the political scene in 1999, the nation’s power output was hovering around 2,700 megawatts. His regime took up the challenge and he placed the late Chief Bola Ige in charge of the ailing sector with an unconvincing declaration of constant power supply across the land by the end of his first term. The irony and tragedy of that avowal was that after sinking a whopping $16bn into the sector, he harvested about 2, 500 megawatts – 200 megawatts less than what he met on the ground. OBJ spent eight years presiding over eternal darkness. Today, the man is walking free while we languish in the dark.

When his ailing successor, the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, came on board, he promised to declare a state of emergency in the power sector. He never did. Nevertheless, power revival formed part of his fabled 7-point agenda and he promised to deliver a colossal 6,000 megawatts by the end of December, 2009. But he failed to deliver on that pledge until he died, leaving behind a miserable output of 3, 000 megawatts.

Under President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch, electricity generation has become more and more erratic despite the sustained attempt to rail road Independent Power Producers into the fray. Nigeria has no alibi to continue to wallow in eternal darkness. Apart from gas and hydro driven sources of power supply, Nigeria has breath-taking potentials it could tap into to generate electricity to run its economy. Data released by the International Energy Commission (IEC) on several countries have revealed that Nigeria generates around 1,173 gigawatthour of electricity from oil, 15,425 from gas, 6,406 from water but 0 from coal, biomas, waste, nuclear, geo-thermal, wind or other renewable sources. Comparatively, South Africa is generating 258,488 from renewable sources and only 3,908 from hydro. So much furious activities are going on in the Nigerian power sector with government officials melting into the dark with billions of stolen money.

With near total collapse of the sector, the Nigerian economy is presently limping on one leg. Consequently, thousands of employment avenues which rely on electricity to operate have vanished to neighbouring countries like the Republic of Benin, Togo and Ghana where power supply is contant. Worst hit is the north of the Niger, Kaduna and Kano in particular. The bubbling industrial haven in Bompai, Kano, is now history. Once in this country, there were 250 textile mills spinning yarns and weaving fabrics with a massive staff population of close to 500,000. More than 90 per cent of the mills were situated in Kaduna alone. Hundreds of thousands of cotton growers were also in business and cotton ginneries located in Gusau, Zaria and Kuru near Jos, were beehives of activities. The Peugeot Automobile of Nigeria (PAN) Limited also had its own fair share of workers who ran into some thousands. The Federal Government made a feeble attempt to revive the textile sector in 2010 when it set aside N100bn for the firms as a way of defusing the unemployment time-bombs in the North. It is the bombs that are being detonated in some parts of the region by the Boko Haram through the instrumentality of idle and jobless youth.

The aggregate of all this rot in the power sector is that the nation spends about N2 trillion to keep generating sets running annually. Of this scandalous amount, Aso Rock alone corners N2bn. Then, there are the health hazards from the use of generating sets in homes, offices and market places. Fuel stored in generators has caused and/or aided market infernos. Many families have also been annihilated by either fire or toxic carbon monoxide emitted by the infernal machines while they were asleep. Similarly, environmental rights activists have pointed to the long-term effects of pollution caused by fuel combustion. These include flooding occasioned by climate change, loss of hearing and cancerous infections. I am afraid that if environmental rights activists decide to visit my abode, they will no doubt drag me to court on a three-count charge of air pollution, environmental degradation and ozone layer depletion based on the three gensets in my custody.