People only pretend that nothing is happening under Jonathan —Prof. Nebo

Minster of Power, Proffessor Chinedu Nebo, is frustrated that in spite of all the efforts of President Goodluck Jonathan to transform the country, there are critics who say noting is happening. In this interview with LEON USIGBE, he cites the case of his ministry as an instance of how far Jonathan has worked and says, were it not for deliberate acts of sabotage by those who do not want the president to succeed, there would have been a different story by now.

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THE power sector is an area of priority for this administration. How are you coping with its challenges?
It is a situation where every Nigerian needs power and where there are so many challenges, challenges at the generating value chain link, challenges at the transmission, challenges at the distribution and then the increasing appetite of our compatriots for power, because it is power that drives industries; it is power that drives enterprises. It is power that drives all the manufacturing outfits, it is really power that drives our education; anywhere you go, power supply is critical, it is actually critical to the survival of our country and to the security of our country. So, lots of things are expected to happen; some good, some bad.

I will say more recently, we have more cases of vandalism of oil and gas pipelines that set us back so very much. We could have been generating a lot more electricity that we currently are doing but for this act of sabotage and act of oil theft by those who are so adept and so unpatriotic that they are doing this to our country. So, these are the areas and then the vandalisation of our transmission infrastructure and vandalisation of our distribution infrastructure; those ones are being controlled because the National Civil Security and Defence Corps (NCSDC) is working very hard to make sure that these assets are protected. The military, especially the army, has been working in tandem with the Ministry of Power, as well as the NCSDC to ensure that this infrastructure is protected.

By next year, this administration will be rounding off and President Goodluck Jonathan is concerned about the legacy he will leave behind. As far as the power sector is concerned, what would you say are the greatest achievements?
When President Jonathan took over as the president of the country, Nigeria was barely generating, transmitting and distributing 2,500 megawatts of electricity. By the time Mr President leaves, Nigeria will most likely be generating as much as three times what he met when he became president and that is a substantial improvement by any standard anywhere. Next, look at the transmission. For so long, it appeared that the transmission infrastructure was neglected. That is the reason the entire structural framework is decaying, aging and becoming useless. Much of the transformers you see, sub stations you see, some of them have been there for decades, ill-maintained, not replaced, not repaired, in a state of very grave disrepair. It was at the coming of President Jonathan’s administration that a focus came to bear with the power sector, especially with regards to transmission. It was then that a national grid was then conceived and being planned in a way to have a real national grid. Not the kind of system we have today that is so radial and so unreliable and so unstable but a forthright national grid that will ensure stability and reliability of the system is being put in place.
It was at the coming of President Jonathan that a whole PHCN...can you imagine a country with an electricity market that did not employ engineers for 16 years? No engineers were being employed, no highly technical people were being employed. It was President Jonathan that solved this and said, ‘wait a minute. Where are we going to? These engineers are old, they are aging and dying. The technical people are aging and dying. Many people can no longer climb the pole to change anything. They will say that their waists have given way, that they are tired and they are retiring.’ So, it was Mr President that now allowed the employment of hundreds of engineers who are now in training, already trained engineers, but we are giving them the proper training to match what Nigeria needs. The same is going for generation, as well as distribution. Lots of things were left undone.
Think of the (National Integrated Power Projects) NIPPS. Even though Jonathan did not start the NIP projects, they essentially were moribund when he became president. It was the government of Jonathan that revived, reactivated and, refunded these entire NIP projects that are today Nigeria’s saviour with regards to electricity supply to our people and this is because NIP projects cut across the entire value chain, not only generating companies, but also transmission infrastructure, as well as distribution infrastructure. So, NIP projects have strengthened the national grid, as it were, and a lot of this is happening under President Goodluck Jonathan.
Now think about the Rural Electrification Project that is coming on board. It was moribund when  Mr President took over. Actually, we have about 1,200 abandoned projects there. It was Mr President who revived the Rural Electrification Agency and decided to now fund the Rural Electrification Agency to ensure that these projects are completed and it is Mr President who now has given us authority to really implement renewable energy policy. We have that in the making and it will be taken care of very shortly. So, there is a lot that Mr President has done and if somebody doubles, triples and even nearly quadruples the massive thing he had when he came into office and within one tenure of presidency, he is able to triple or quadruple that, you can’t beat that anywhere in the world.

The essence of what government is doing is to enhance the welfare of the people. The government has virtually completed the privatisation of power infrastructure yet there are Nigerians who say nothing is being done in the area of power supply in the country. How do you convince them?
It is unfortunate but, it is human nature. There are people who never believed that anything would happen or is happening. If you go to a match and your opponent scores a goal, you can choose to accept that they have scored a goal and then try to respond to that goal scored or you  can pretend that it was a mirage that, that goal was not real. Meanwhile, the referee had ruled that it is a goal and all the onlookers are seeing that it is a goal. That is what is happening to the government of President Jonathan. So much is happening. There are communities that have not seen power for decades, they have power now. It may not be in the quality and quantity that they demand but, we are getting there. The fact is there is a big giant step each day and we are moving on. But, electricity supply is not like building a house where you complete the first floor and you can move in and then do the second floor and then continue until you finish. No. In electricity supply, because by the very nature of the technical input you have to do, you must make sure that everything is done, all the right expenditure have taken place, everybody has been paid, the contractor has delivered, the project is now commissioned and the project is now certified to be fit. By the time you do this, sometimes, it takes years. People come and they see a sub-station standing there. They may not realise that, that little sub-station might have taken billions of Naira to do.
So, government is moving but because of the massive population of Nigeria, sometimes it is not very evident. Give us a year and half and Nigerians will know that no government has come near to doing anything in electricity as the government of President Jonathan has done.

You talked earlier about sabotage. Can you confidently say that you are capable of preserving power infrastructure, given the level of sabotage and can the goals of government regarding power supply  be met?
This is why we appeal to those of you in the media to help us mount a campaign. It is not easy. The oil thieves have learned how to make quick money, which I call blood money, because when they vandalise these pipelines, especially the ones associated with gas, we lose gas supply; gas doesn’t go to the turbines. Many people don’t even realise that it is not only the power sector that suffers. If there is no gas, we cannot produce fertilizer and if there is no fertilizer, the farmers cannot get the agricultural input that they need in time when it is needed.
What is the result? Crop failure across the land.
So, these saboteurs and oil thieves are really bleeding the Nigerian economy, causing the economy to haemorrhage. Thoes of the gas pipeline are horrible because they are not doing it for money, it is sabotage. They go there, target spots, very remote places along the entire line of gas pipeline and use dynamite, detonate these dynamite, blow up gas pipelines. At the end of the day, it takes months upon months to repair these things. The more you repair them, the more you discover more holes. We are right now battling with over 20 holes, dynamite holes in Warri-Escravos line. Can you imagine that? All done to sabotage this country, to make sure that people think President Jonathan is doing nothing whereas, if we had gas, we would easily be generating 1,000 megawatts, more than we are generating now if not for this sabotage. So, it is a painful thing.
And then, look at the other sabotage of distribution outfits. Some young men cannibalise transformers, steal copper. The copper they steal, they go to the markets, sell the coppers as scraps for N10,000 and knock out more than one million people from power for a month and they don’t care. For N10,000 and then at the end of the day, it costs the distribution company N27 million to fix what people destroyed. That’s why we need a massive campaign, all of us working together, synergising to let Nigerians know that we are all suffering for the vandalisation.

The government has always cited the revolution in the GSM sector when it tries to rationalise the privatisation of the power sector. Nigerians expect that as you privatise the power sector, things will change as in the GSM sector. How long do Nigerians have to wait to see this change in the power sector?
You know the GSM saga was really a revolution. I see a much greater revolution with the privatisation of the power sector. The reasons are very obvious. Think for instance, GSM revolution started in 1999. The first SIM card I bought, I still have that telephone number. The same telephone number I have used since 1999 to this time, I bought that SIM card for over N20,000. Now you can get SIM card for N200 or free. When Nigeria started this, many of our people were skeptical; ‘where is it going? Where is it going?’ They never believed it would work. That’s why many Nigerian firms did not come in and eventually, a South African firm came in and the greatest, largest profit that MTN is making in the whole world is in Nigeria and that profit is being regularly repatriated to South Africa because our people didn’t catch the vision.
Now, with power, we see the same thing. It is going to happen but, it will not happen overnight. We didn’t just grow from a few thousand GSM lines to 110 million GSM lines overnight. It took time. And you know there is still the issue of the stabilisation of the system, network problem here and there but, there has been general improvement. People can communicate. You can talk to old parents or grandparents in the villages. The same thing is going to happen with power. The government alone cannot muster all the energies because government has so many children, so many ministries, so many departments and cannot muster all these funds just for one sector, so it invited private players to come. Many of these private players, those who bought the generation companies, are already talking about doubling the capacity to generate. Some are talking about tripling the capacity to generate. All these things will be in place. That’s why the government is moving so hard to make sure that transmission is strengthened and it will be strengthened.
Government has lined up billions of US dollars worth of projects that, as the explosion is going on in generation, there is a concomitant improvement, advancement, expansion of transmission and then, those who bought the distribution companies (DISCOs) are already moving to make sure that they meet the demands of their business plans, reduce looses and begin to expand. These things are going to happen. You know, one day at a time, some of them will come very rapidly and some of them will be slower but, we will get there. I keep saying it and I think I will be vindicated, not very long from now, that what will happen in the power sector will make what happened in the telecoms industry a dwarf in terms of comparison.

NIGERIAN TRIBUNE