Power: Why are we still in darkness?

There were some interesting campaign quotes attributed to Babatunde Raji Fashola, then Governor of Lagos, now Minister of Power, Works and Housing, state during the 2015 election Campaign. One of such quoted Fashola as saying that the only way to get electricity right was to vote for the APC.

But as we all have discovered the tactics of winning an election is different from that of governance. While a campaign manager only needs to mount the rostrum and highlight the bad sides of an incumbent government, governance has more to do with planning, especially careful planning.

Perhaps, based on the notion that Fashola did wonders in Lagos, President Muhammadu Buhari has assigned him the biggest portfolio. He is more of an Okunrinmeta, expected to perform unseen wonders in the areas of electricity, which had defied so many greats including Chief Bola Ige; Housing sector, which no one knows its true focus, and the Works, with dilapidated roads all around.

Right now, you don’t need to ask from Fashola how market. Seeing him immediately conveys the picture of a man in constant battle with the spirits that have instituted darkness in the land. And it is apparent the war has not been a tea party.

But why has the task of fixing the power sector this enduring? The experts will bring up so many technicalities with which they have been unable to sort the riddle thus far.  The common man will point at the insincerity of the government and perhaps lack of the will power by the successive governments.

The privatisation exercise which saw the power generation and distribution companies change to private ownership was hailed by many including the World Bank,  which we were told was involved in the process and was said to have described it as transparent enough. The power sector workers, who had wanted to constitute a cog in the wheel of that privatisation were settled with almost all the proceeds of the privatisation in a desperate bid to ‘let my people go.’

Everyone expects that all would be well but years down the line, darkness has continued to envelop the nation’s horizon. Something must be wrong somewhere. Fashola on assumption of office sided with the

DISCOS and agreed with them that an increased tariff would settle the problem. Even though some consumers have dragged the DISCOS and government to court to stop the increment, the tariff stays. Despite that, no one has seen any improvement in supply. The generation has remained around the 2013/2014 peak and it is just as if nothing is changing in that sector.

To get to the roots of the power crisis, the government needs to x-ray properly the travails of those at the downstream sector of the power supply chain.

The experience since the inauguration of the DISCOS and GENCOS has shown that we have only exchanged one monopoly for another. Whereas the PHCN operated with the arrogance of government protection, the successor DISCOS perfected the arrogance to another level. They show the consumers that they are essential to their lives and you can only worship them.

But the basic issue at the heart of the failures in the power sector in the aftermath of the privatisation should rest on the shoulders of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the bureau that midwifed the privatisation process. The agency simply failed to adopt a business model in the power transaction.

The basic problem is that the BPE, which facilitated the successful privatisation of the Telecoms sector in 2000 had tinkered with the process by the time it was advising government to sell the power infrastructure such that rather than adopt the fruitful model which saw the Telecoms sector grow rapidly within I short while, it diluted the process and no one can really understand which type of business system the DISCOS are operating.

Right now, despite the fact that the DISCOS are privatised, you don’t get to see them electrifying communities or installing transformers. The Federal Government through many lawmakers, the communities and town unions are busy fixing poles, cables and transformers. Yet the DISCOS would readily serve bills on the areas once connected.

One fault line of the BPE is the failure to ensure the DISCIOS leave a space of time to meter the communities and electrify the virgin areas before they can start talking of profits. What we have seen is that most of the DISCOS only succeeded in paying for the companies and immediately that is done, they set up accounts and marketing companies to rake in profits.

But that was not the case with the Telecoms sector. The telecoms companies took time to wire the country, erected masts, and rolled out their networks from city to city and the villages and then started a gradual progress towards the bounty they now enjoy.

In the case of the power sector, they want to run before learning how to crawl and that is the crux of the matter.

Today, it is easier for the companies to give excuses why they can’t meter the whole country, when they know that should be the easiest way to collect tariff. What is more confounding is that in many areas, their staff are not bothered if areas that are mostly metered complain of electrical faults. They prefer to go to those places without metres because at the end of the day crazy bill will land on the doorsteps of their victims. Unless a Minister dissects the above intricate web carefully, he can’t solve the Nigerian power puzzle.