The Executive Director for Research and Advocacy of the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), Barrister Sunday Oduntan, has disclosed that Nigerians spend about N12 trillion on self-power generation annually.
Barr Oduntan also revealed that Nigerian homes and businesses produced 40,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity with diesel and petrol per annum.
He spoke at Ota, Ogun State, while delivering a paper titled: “Power for Sustainable Development in Ogun State”, during the third edition of the Ladi Adebutu Good Governance Symposium.
Oduntan, who is the official spokesperson for the DisCos, noted that self-power generation was propelled by low power generation by the country, which required 40,000MW to guarantee stable electricity.
He identified corruption, increased energy theft, regulatory inconsistency and confusion, liquidity crises of the power sector, non-cost reflective tariffs and limited power generation as some of the challenges confronting the nation’s power sector.
Oduntan also lamented non-payment of debts by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), noting that the debts stood at N203,819bn.
Going down memory lane, he noted that, “There was no institutional and regulatory framework to govern progress and development in the sector until 2005. This is why the tariff is only recovering about 30 per cent of costs.
“All these informed part of the reason why NEPA was insolvent, inefficient and underperforming. Between 2012 and 2014, $5bn was spent on self-generation which could have given us an additional 5000MW.”
In their separate remarks, the Chief Executive Officer of Ikeja Electric, Mrs Folake Soetan, and a legal practitioner, Ehi Uwaifoh, noted that stable power supply would boost industrialisation drive of the state, especially at the Ota-Agbara industrial hub.
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