By Adewale Sanyaolu
The Federal Government yesterday said electricity subsidy targeted at supporting Nigerians at the lower band rate gulped N120 billion in 2022.
Special Adviser to the President on Power and Infrastructure, Mr. Zakari Ahmed, stated this during a live interview on Channels Television.
Ahmed explained that Government continues to subsidise those within the C,D and E tariff bands, who, he said, are mostly without longer hours of power supply and less affluent. He said government will continue to support citizens who need help, especially through subsidies to enable them feel the impact of governance. He noted that the power sector was comatose when the Buhari administration came on board and that subsidies were ballooning to about N582 billion.
Ahmed said the subsidies were meant to support those at the bottom of the pyramid, especially those with lower band tariff rates, adding that there was no national scalable metering programme and renewable energy policy which wasn’t in place, adding that there was even provision in the Act setting up the rural electrification fund since 2005 which was only set up in 2017 when the Buhari came to power.
‘‘We equally inherited problems, especially when the DisCos as well as other assets were either sold to people that have not been capable to manage them or contractors that couldn’t execute projects.
At the moment we have been able to stabilise the sector. Eight out of the eleven DisCos sold to incapable investors have been restructured by the Buhari administration. We have a national mass metering programme which aims to eliminate the deficit in the sector and rural electrification programme.
In December, we recorded our largest collections of N80 billion in the history of the Nigerian power sector,’’.
On NMMP, he said the first phase has distributed one million meters while the process for another four million meters to be handled by local manufacturers has equally been concluded.
adding that the Nigerian Electricity Management Service Agency(NEMSA), have certified 20 new local manufacturing companies to assembly the meters locally.
He added that President Muhammadu Buhari, withheld some funding that was available from the World Bank for a short period of time to enable it restructure the Discos, stressing that there was another World Bank facility to fund another 1.25 million meters.
The Special Adviser said the metering gap when the administration came on board was about 9.8 million meters but would have been reduced by six million meters when the NMMP gets completed.
He worried that polices on renewable energy, rural electrification were equally gathering dust on the shelve until the current administration came in.
Recall that the World Bank has said that subsidies benefit only rich households and reduce government spending on poor Nigerians.
This was contained in a statement on the bank’s website announcing the launch of the new Nigeria Public Finance Review report.
According to the bank, Nigeria’s resources had been consumed by inefficient and regressive subsidiaries on petrol, electricity and foreign exchange.
It added that the subsidies were far more than what was spent on education, health and social protection in 2021.
