‘Only Nigeria has 200m people with poor electricity’

An expert, Dr Onuoha Nnachi, has said Nigeria is the only country with over 200 million population but with a national grid with less than 10,000 megawatts (MW) electricity capacity.

Dr Nnachi, who is a managing partner at Deutsche Partners Holding, stated this during a chat with newsmen in Abuja ahead of the forthcoming infrastructure dialogue next week.

He said, “Sometimes the global community wonders how Nigeria survives with over 200 million population depending on less than 10,000MW electricity. There is no country in the world that has over 200m population and generates less than 10,000MW of power.

“The standard of power generation is one million population per 1,000MW for a functional country. Singapore, a country with a population of six million generates over 7,000MW. In Africa, South Africa with 54m people generates 58,000MW.”

He noted that at the infrastructure dialogue, stakeholders would discuss post-COVID infrastructure financing.

He also said the infrastructure deficit in Nigeria stood at $3tn and that the government would need to act on it.

Nnachi said, “This is the foremost event that deals with infrastructure. We create a forum for a dialogue, where stakeholders sit down and compare notes with what is happening in other developed countries across the world. In Nigeria, we are growing under a hard infrastructure deficit.”