President Goodluck Jonathan has advised the incoming government of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari to avoid reversing the privatization of the power sector.
According to the president, reversing the privatisation would impact negatively on Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) into the country.
This was made known by the Minister of Power, Prof Chinedu Nebo while responding to questions after the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC)’s meeting yesterday.
He also blamed the poor electricity supply in the country on the activities of gas pipelines vandals.
There has been a public outcry in the country that the privatization of the nation’s power sector has not been able to improve power generation and distribution in the country even as the populace has been overburdened with excessive tariff.
Nebo said “I think the incoming government will be ill-advised to reverse privatization and liberalization of power generation, transmission and distribution because any attempt to do that would be to set Nigeria back many many many decades.
“The gains of privatization are very obvious. If we can solve the problem of gas, like we are talking about energy mix, we are not just going by gas we are doing hydros. It was this same administration that flagged off Zungeru hydro power plants for 750 megawatts and is a bid to flag off Mambilla 3,050 megawatts, Shiroro has been improved, revamped, Kanji revamped and improved, the same as Jebba.
So there is a lot of work being done by the government. However, to turn back on privatization would mean stopping all of these companies and then reversing the massive inflow of investments coming into the power sector. Nigeria’s power consumption per capita is one of the lowest in the world and that is part of the efforts of government to reverse that. So I don’t think it is in the best interest of the country.”