Power: It’s sabotage, Senate says of GENCOs, DISCOs

In an ironical twist of fate, which seemed to buttress the need to look into the country’s power sector, the ongoing probe into the sector by the Senate was cut short by power outage at the Assembly complex.

There were power cuts two times within a space of six minutes between 2.20pm and 2.26pm. A third outage occurred at 3.12pm.

The probe panel members were forced to receive presentations using lights from media cameras and rechargeable lamps.

At a point, the chairman of the Senate committee handling the probe, Senator Abubakar Kyari (APC, Borno North) asked the chief executives of the power generating and distribution firms present at the venue, “Are you tired? Are you guys calling your people to do this?”

Moments after Kyari spoke, two subsequent power outages occurred at 3:26pm and 3:31pm.

He also had a dose of the power failure as he was interrupted while commenting on issues raised by some of the stakeholders.

Moved by the development, Senator Kyari, after the session, told journalists that the committee would investigate what led to the power outages during the session, alleging that it was sabotage aimed at frustrating the committee.

He vowed that the public hearing proper on the sector would hold in due course, adding “the power outages experienced here today (yesterday) further underscores the relevance of this committee at this critical time, but we shall investigate whether or not they are deliberate.”

The Senate committee is investigating allegations of corruption in the sector that is reportedly making electricity power unavailable in the country, in spite of the huge resources that have been committed to it by successive administrations in the country.

In his presentation, the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises, Mr. Benjamin Dikki, told the committee he needed time to present the figures as to how much it cost to privatise Nigeria’s power plants.

He said he could not give the figures at the sitting because he did not know how much it cost to build the plants.

He spoke in a response to a question from a committee member, who asked the DG to “tell Nigerians how much the power plants were sold because during Tuesday’s hearing, the committee was told $USD 8.23bn was what was spent on these plants prior to the privatisation.’’

Read also: Senate begins probe of power sector under OBJ Yar’Adua, GEJ

Earlier, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Power, Godknows Igali, had denied speculations that the Federal Government was planning a wholesale privatisation of the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

He said, “I want to correct an impression, government has no plan to privatise TCN; what we are doing is to work out an arrangement so that the market will pay for services.”

Representatives of the various generation and distribution companies, who made submissions at the hearing, decried the difficult business environment in the country.

They said that they had been running at a loss because they were not allowed to charge tariffs that would help them recoup part of their investments in the sector.

Making a submission on behalf of the distribution companies, the Managing Director of Enugu Distribution Company, Mr. Robert Dickerman, said he and his colleagues had been running at a deficit of “N20bn per month” because over 50 percent of electricity consumers had no have meters while about 30 per cent were not even on the billing system of the service providers.

He also lamented that the N100bn subsidy injection promised by the Federal Government had not been provided.

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