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By Derrick Bangura
According to the Federal Government, the deplorable electricity supply situation across the country is the result of a combination of challenges.
However, the Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, stated that the issues are being addressed.
The Minister, speaking to State House Correspondents following this week’s virtual Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, said the recent collapse of the national grid, which he identified as one of the challenges causing a nationwide blackout, had been resolved.
Responding to questions from correspondents, Aliyu noted beside the collapse of the grid, other issues, including scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalisation of pipelines as well as the disputes around availability gas and payment for gas contracts between gas companies and power generating companies, had contributed to the current power crisis.
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“It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC has addressed as you can see evidence everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations.
“It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid.
“We have now recovered the grid.” The grid has been restored, and we are working to add more megawatts to the system. We’ve formed several small committees, all with the goal of adding more megawatts to the grid. Basically, the issue revolves around gas.
“You must have a gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers—some of which are form contracts, some of which are not.” We’re looking into it and will have some solutions ready in a few days,” he said.
The Minister also clarified the amount of electricity generated in the country, saying, “We have capacity of 8,000 megawatts – on the grid, imbedded, and captive.” When you add them all together, you get the problems we’re having. We are on top of the challenge and will be out of it very soon.”
