How corruption in power sector got into literature

For the civil rights group, the Socio Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), there could not have been a better time to put under scrutiny, the numerous challenges that have so far crippled Nigeria’s quest to generate and distribute sustainable power to different households 57 years after independence.

Indeed, in a desperate attempt to find a lasting solution to the nagging challenges of power, the Federal Government had proceeded with the privatization of power distributing assets in 2013, but four years after, many Nigerians are still complaining about the epileptic nature of a scheme they consider ‘a nightmare.’

But for Adetokunbo Mumuni, the Executive Director, SERAP, the task of getting it right in Nigeria’s power sector must first be examined from both the remote and immediate causes as that can only serve as a pedestal to know the actual places where the right antidotes should be applied.

“Like many other Nigerians, those of us at SERAP are concerned that at an age where even smaller countries are celebrating steady power supply, Nigeria, as big as it is still celebrates darkness, hence our decision to investigate and document what we have seen. This led us to commission Dr Yemi Oke from University of Lagos (UNILAG) to help us investigate challenges hindering Nigeria’s quest to have steady power supply like other countries. 

“At the end, what we have always suspected to be chief contributor, that is unbridled corruption, has once again been identified as the basis for the epileptic nature of power generation and supply in Nigeria. We therefore feel it will not be enough to just report the outcome of our investigation, we feel it has to be properly documented in book form for future reference, and that was how we got; ‘From Darkness to Darkness: How Nigerians are paying the price for corruption in the electricity sector’,” Mumuni said.

While the book revisited eight identified cases that had once rocked the power sector in Nigeria, its research also discovered eight factors, considered to aid and abet the tide of corruption and impunity. These factors are: Lack of effective monitoring and supervision, the top-down model of electricity governance in Nigeria, institutional decay and the current corrupt attitudinal dispositions of sector officials and other players in the power sector, the current structural arrangement, institutional improprieties, state monopoly, state-controlled electricity governance model and lack of decentralized energy options.