The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola SAN, has begged Niger Delta militants to stop vandalising oil pipelines in their region.
He made this known while making his Opening Address as Guest Speaker at the January edition of the Nextier Power Dialogue held at the Thought Pyramid Art Centre
Fashola, while explaining the current decreased power supply and outages across the country, blamed the sabotage of gas pipelines by those he described as “some of our angry brothers”, adding that because of the debt owed gas companies by the DisCos, the companies also withheld supply of gas.
The Minister, who noted that there have been some outages across the country in the last 24 hours, however, assured Nigerians that himself, the Permanent Secretary and other officials of the Ministry were trying to see what they could do to rectify the situation.
Emphasizing the need to increase liquidity in the sector, Fashola explained that as a result of the frequent power outages due to the sabotage of power assets, the operators along the power chain were being owed as distribution companies could not pay generating companies who equally could not pay gas suppliers who, in turn, could not pay their bankers.
The Minister pointed out that while the problems were going on, debts were being owed to the gas companies, who, at the end of the day, must close their account to show how much was sold, how much was pushed out and how much they would be paid, adding that the debts had been accumulating since 2015 leading to gas companies currently shutting their tanks and forcing power again down to 2,000MW.
The Minister pointed out that Government has made progress in its efforts to achieve energy sufficiency, which was its first objective at inception, added, “In the last one year that we have been in office, we have got to an all-time high of 5074MW. Nigeria has never reached there before. But immediately we got that, do you know what happened? They started breaking the gas pipelines one by one. We had 14 attacks in about two months”.
“We need to get power from wherever we can. So, we said the first step is Incremental Power wherever we could get it; as long as it is legitimate, it is safe, it is environmentally compliant, we would put it on. But some of our brothers are angry; and I continue to tell them anger is not a strategy”, he said adding, however, “I know they will not be angry forever”.
The Minister , who appealed for peace and understanding among the “angry brothers”, appealed to their relations and friends to persuade them to embrace peace adding, “While they are angry, they are punishing us, they are punishing themselves, they are punishing everybody”.
According to Fashola, the nation lost about 3,000MW from the past encounter resulting to blackout across the country “because the Grid becomes very vulnerable when there is not enough energy up to its carrying capacity”, adding that contrary to the notion in some quarters that the Grid was static, it was actually growing every day.
You hear us announcing that we commissioned one transmission project or the other, you see me going round for these commissioning; that is the Grid evolving. Today, at its most frugal, it would support 6,500MW; pushed to its limit it would carry 7,200MW. So it is not true when you hear that the Grid capacity is not more than 5,000MW. It is growing every day and more projects are coming up. We have completed some and more are still coming up. So that is where we are”, he said.
The Minister said while power was out due to attacks in one axis, the expansion of either the Grid or gas supply was kept alive on another axis and hydro power was also being expanded adding that though over 3,000MW was lost within that period, a steady average of about 3,000MW to 4,000MW was built back from around August until last week.
“Now it means that notionally, if we had those 3,000MW plus 4,000MW we were already at 7,000MW. But we would not have it because some of our family members are angry”, he said adding that because of the problems, power came down to about 2,000MW and once the power goes below 3,000MW, the Grid would begin to react.