President Bola Tinubu’s grand plan to revamp the power sector will be vitiated if urgent measures are not taken to address the metering, transmission and other challenges militating against steady power supply to the nation’s millions of electricity consumers. Towards the end of December last year, the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, announced federal government’s intention to purchase and distribute about 2million pre-paid meters to electricity consumers on estimated billings before the end of the first quarter of 2025.
The minister explained that delivering the 2million meters was the first batch of the 10million meters earmarked to be distributed nationwide in the next five years under the Presidential Metering Initiative (PMI) to end estimated billings by the electricity distribution companies (DisCos). One of the problems since the power sector reforms is the huge number of unmetered electricity consumers. The number of Nigerians on estimated billings is about 7.1 million. These customers cannot control their energy consumption due to absence of meters.
They are also given estimated billings by the DisCos at arbitrary rates. That is why some consumers regard the charges as crazy bills. According to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), out of 12,825,005 registered electricity consumers in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) only 5,707,838 or 44.51 per cent are metered. Bridging the metering gap requires more concrete actions from the government than official pronouncements.
Metering all electricity consumers in the country will save energy, reduce energy theft and end crazy billings. Unfortunately, past efforts by the government to bridge the metering gap, including the National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP) of 2020, did not succeed. Government should encourage local manufacturing of electricity meters. It is perhaps the first step towards ensuring that all electricity consumers in the country are metered.
Beyond bridging the metering gap, the government must begin to fix the obsolete power sector infrastructure nationwide as a prelude to increasing power generation and distribution. While South Africa electricity generation is 40,000MW, Nigeria is still struggling to generate between 4,000MW and 5,000MW. The target of hitting 10,000MW is still a tall dream. It should worry the government that about 92 million Nigerians do not have access to electricity.
The Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, recently decried that access to reliable electricity power supply, power outages and constant interruptions might prove a more challenging constraint in Nigeria and other African countries to internet access and Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption than anything else.
The former Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, who stated this at the 10th Convocation ceremony of the African University of Science and Technology (AUST), Abuja, said “AI could generate $136billion in productivity gains, including cost and time savings and increased revenues for four African countries—Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.” The WTO boss pointed out that “if Nigeria could get it right, our economy could reap major rewards.”
We urge the government to earnestly listen to the concerns raised by the former minister on access to reliable electricity supply and come up with pragmatic measures to urgently address them. This calls for enhanced funding for the sector. Without doubt, the current funding of the sector can hardly address its mounting challenges. The other day, the power minister said that the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) would require about N2.7 trillion to complete 149 ongoing projects across the country. This amount, the minister says, is bigger than the ministry’s 2025 budget.
The minister was quoted as saying that completing these projects will remarkably improve power supply in the country. It is expected that the first phase of the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) in collaboration with Siemens of Germany will increase the nation’s power supply to 7,000MW. Similarly, the second phase of the programme will witness power supply of 11,000MW. It is equally expected that the third phase will deliver about 25,000MW of electricity supply.
However, these can only be achieved if the obsolete power infrastructures across the country are replaced with new ones. These include the upgrading of existing transmission substations, transformers as well as transmission lines. Others include the upgrading and expansion of generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure.
The government also plans to address the frequent collapse of the national grid by building five substations nationwide. To meet the nation’s power supply needs, the government should invest so much in solar energy and other clean and renewable energy sources which abound in the country.