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Enugu State Governor Peter Mbah has disclosed that President Tinubu’s signing of the Electricity Act in June 2023, was an opportunity to make good his campaign promise of ensuring a 24-hour power supply.
Speaking in an interview with Daily Sun, Mbah stated that the signing of the act was a long-awaited opportunity, something that would help his administration determine the state’s power deficit.
According to him, electricity supply in all nooks and crannies of the state means investment that would enhance the government tackling inherent challenges.
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“We saw a huge opportunity following the signing of the Electricity Act in June last year by President Bola Tinubu and we felt that this is a long-awaited opportunity, in fact, belated in my view.
“Having electricity devolved and also made it a shared responsibility, so, it was an exclusive preserve of the federal government. We now have it in the Concurrent Legislative List. We have a legal framework that gave us the opportunity to play in that space.
“So, we took advantage of it. We had to set up the Electricity Market Law of Enugu State. That Bill was prepared and ensured that there was an expeditious passage of that bill and of course, I did not hesitate to sign it into law.
“What that did was that it allowed us to set up the Enugu Electricity Regulatory Commission which again under the Act, you needed to have your own electricity regulatory commission for power to devolve from NERC to that state electricity regulatory commission.
“So, in terms of structure and the legal framework, we made sure that we were ready.
“But don’t forget that we had also mentioned during our campaign to our people that we were going to ensure a 24/7 power supply. So, this has now given us the opportunity to see how we can reference Enugu as a State, determine our power deficit, and what we actually need as a state to fully provide electricity across the nooks and crannies of this state.
“And also, to be able to attract the investment because we are now able to deal across the value chain because if you look at the global challenge of electricity, it’s multi-faceted, it’s not just looking at production and say we have production deficit-we are 220million people, we are only producing 12,000megawatts. But that’s not the issue.
“Even the one we are producing, as minimal as it is; we are still having the challenges of evacuating the power or even the transmission, to send it to the last man, get to the distribution, take it to the last man.
“There are some inherent challenges in that whole value chain. So, we now have the opportunity to reference Enugu; look at Enugu and say what will be the strategy to ensure that we deliver power to our people 24 hours, where do we need to invest, how do we design that because even if you look at the distribution, beyond the technical capacity, you also deal with a lot of other issues like the metering,” he said.
