President Muhammadu Buhari has assured Nigerians that his administration would fix the challenges facing the power sector in the country.
The President who identified transmission as the greatest challenge in the sector said he has prepared a blueprint to tackle the problem.
He said his administration will give the fullest possible attention to boosting power supply because it was convinced that steady electricity will launch the country into faster socio-economic development.
Speaking after being briefed by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Power, Ambassador Godknows Igali, President Buhari said that his administration had already identified the critical problems in Nigeria’s power sector and was taking appropriate actions to address them.
The President said that his administration had also prioritized certain measures in its action plan to boost electricity supply in Nigeria. The problems besetting our power sector are not difficult to identify. Therefore, priorities can be easily set in order to tackle them.
“The problems are more with transmission than generation, and we equally need to secure the power infrastructure round the country. We will address all these issues,” the President assured.
Ambassador Igali revealed that the power generation has improved to 4,600 megawatts (Mw) from about 3,000Mw.
“We are doing over 4600Mw of power on the grid and we can do better. But then this is a big improvement from about 3,000 Mw. Other times when we attain 4,000Mw, because of pipeline disruptions we go down to about 2000Mw. We’ve consistently in the past two months been over 4,500Mw, now reaching close to 4,700Mw.”
He said: “Distribution remains a challenge because that’s where customers feel it most. We are working with a lot of the Discos very closely, tracking them, to make sure that what is needed at the distribution level is done.