Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo
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By Chuks Okocha, Muhammad Bello and Ejiofor Alike
The laxity and incompetence exhibited by the top management of the Ministry of Power and other administrative heads in the sector, coupled with inadequate gas supply, as well as the challenges in transmission infrastructure have led to a sharp drop in electricity supply in the country, investigations by THISDAY have revealed.
THISDAY gathered that the laxity stems from ineffective coordination and monitoring of the activities in the six generation and 11 distribution companies by the Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo, who appears not to have grasped the enormity of the task at hand.
The failure of the minister to apply sanctions for non-performance like his predecessor, Professor Bart Nnaji, combined with the privatisation process, which has created uncertainty over job security are said to have made electricity workers fall back to their “business-as-usual” mindset of the pre-Nnaji era.
It was learnt that while Nnaji, as minister, did not hesitate to sack the chief executive officers of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and four distribution companies for failing to meet performance targets and gave marching orders to others to perform or be shipped out, an apparently naive Nebo relies on whatever information these officials feed him with as a measure of their performance.
“Nebo might be well intentioned, but his lack of hands-on-approach has led to a drastic drop in electricity output. He is over-reliant on the managers of these utilities who obviously lie to him about the real situation.
“But the problem with electricity output is that it is not something you can lie about. Consumers would immediately feel it when there is an increase in generation and when there is a perceptible drop.
“Whenever electricity peaks at 4,000MW or more we all see the difference, so no one should tell us that we are generating 4,500MW because that is a blatant lie.
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