Former Governor of Benue State and Chairman, Senate Committee on Power, Senator Gabriel Suswan says the basic and most fundamental challenge confronting the power sector in Nigeria is lack of quality data.
Nigeria presently has the capacity to generate about 12,500 Megawatts of electricity, being largely dependent on hydropower and fossil (gas) thermal power sources.
However, currently, only 3,500 MW to 5,000 MW is typically available for onward transmission to the final consumer.
In an interview with TNC in Abuja on Thursday, Suswan said that there was no data for planning to ensure an adequate supply of electricity to citizens.
“When you don’t have data how do you plan? We have over 200 million and we are planning for 2million. We can’t meet up so we need quality data with integrity. Not just people sitting in their rooms and extrapolating on what is the data. Lack of data in the power sector is a problem. Once you have data you can now plan and know how many people are on the national grid, how many people are metered and how many people are not metered, so that you can meter them and then you can now know the exact quality of power you are sending to them.”
The PDP-Benue North-East representative noted that stakeholders in the sector were not structuring planning in the sector to be in consonance with the increase in the population of the country.
According to him, all the stakeholders need to be on the same page to plan properly otherwise the nation may not make any meaningful progress on the plan to significantly improve its power generation capacity.
He explained that part of the Senate committee’s oversight function was to ensure efficient utilization of funds appropriated to managers of the value chain in the power sector.
Regulating the agencies effectively, he said, is a task that needed to be handled by the National Assembly.
“NERC, is supposed to be an independent body to regulate the power sector. But in all developing economies, similar regulators have not had the independence that they should have and the reason being political. Because when it comes to tariff, which is an issue in all developing economies, increase in tariff is what people resist vehemently and so NERC is not completely as independent as it is supposed to be. It has to ponder the people who appoint them,” he said.
Suswan, however, expressed worry that regulating the sector effectively will be difficult because there is interference.
“We as politicians look at the political consequence while they are looking at the economic consequence. And so if the polity is unstable, of course, the economy will not operate as well. So, it is difficult to have an independent regulator in the power sector in a developing economy,” the lawmaker said.