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Nigerians have been told to expect better performance from the current administration as efforts were in place to revive the power sector.
Ajuri Ngelale, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs and member of the Presidential Power Initiative, said President Muhammadu Buhari had engaged processes to ensure that the transformation in Nigeria’s power sector is visible to all by 2021.
“Nigerians have got the right to be sceptical, they were told that we would be generating 40,000 megawatts by 2020 and all of that, and that has not happened.
“So, we understand that if government says something about the power sector Nigerians are very sceptical, but we are asking our people to pay attention to what is happening right now.
“Earlier this year, around July, the Federal Government signed an MoU with Siemens, a global engineering giant based in Germany.
“As a result of the meeting with Angela Merkel and President Muhammadu Buhari in the State House, they agreed that the German government would step in and assist us with the development of our power sector.
“So, what we are telling Nigerians, and we are saying it openly for them to hold us to account, is that, by December 2021, we would have increased our distribution capacity from 3,000 megawatts to about 7,000 megawatts.
“Which means Nigerians will see more than double the capacity they have been seeing over the last several decades within the next two years,” he said.
Ngelale stated that, due to some challenges in the sector, government was focused on distribution.
“Mr. President has said we need to deal with distribution before we touch anything else, let Nigerians be seeing the power that we are already generating.
“While that is going on, as we get towards 2021, we are also building the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano gas pipeline but, along that pipeline, there is going to be three power plants.
“One in Abuja, Kaduna and Kano; each power plant is going to generate 1,350 megawatts; if you put all that together that is of course more than 4,000 megawatts of new power.
“And that is separate from the Mambilla Hydropower Project that’s about 3,500 megawatts that we are currently at the end of negotiations with Chinese Government.”
Ngelale, while expressing government’s excitement at the project, reiterated that, by 2023, power distribution would have risen to 11,000 megawatts.
“So, 7,000 megawatts distribution by 2021 and 11,000 MW generation, transmission and distribution by 2023 under this Siemens deal is something we are very excited about,” he added.
He maintained that the Siemens deal was 80 per cent funded by the German Export Credit Agency with 20 per cent counterpart fund by the Nigerian government, with no potential for corruption to derail the power project.
