From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
The extraordinary Federal Executive Council meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday, approved all 16 memos on power presented by Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu.
Some of the projects costs are in both dollar, euro and naira. The costs are $65,606,420, €15,152,651 and N31,360,272,397.
Briefing State House Correspondents at the end of the meeting, Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said the meeting was to ensure the council begins on a clean slate in 2022.
Meanwhile, Aliyu has blamed the epileptic power supply in the country on the lack of attention paid to the development of the sector in the past.
He said the current administration has done more than any other to ensure Nigerians enjoy improved supply of electricity.
He said contrary to the impression that nothing was being down to tackle epileptic power supply, the government was doing a lot to remedy the situation with more investments in the sector which he said had manifested in the less system collapsed being witnessed in the country.
While noting that the Federal Government has placed order for power equipment, the minister assured Nigerians will soon see the outcome of the ongoing investments.
Aliyu maintained that the present power generation in the country is about 5,000mw as he decried, what he termed, the weak transmission grid.
Speaking on the memo he presented, Aliyu said: “Today, I presented to council 16 memos, which I seek for council’s approval and the council graciously approved all of them. At this point, let me say what these approvals will do to the nation’s electricity supply.
“As we’re all aware, the major problem we’re having in the electricity supply industry is to be able to evacuate sufficient electricity and distribute them. That is to say, we have a very weak transmission grid and distribution segment of the value chain.
“We may not be having much problem with generation. So, unless we’re able to strengthen the electricity grid, which is nationwide, and to expand, and to be able to evacuate, what the grid can take to consumers, we will have a lot of problems ahead of us.
“So, what we’re doing currently through various and several interventions is to be able to repair the grid by constructing new transmission lines, bringing in new equipment to replace the old ones at our sub-stations. So, that will release more capacity to the distribution and leading to the customers.
“So, the operational capacity, as you all know now is hovering around 5,000 megawatts and the transmission and distribution.
“So, these projects that we brought to council today and got approvals are all geared towards strengthening the willing capacity of the transmission and towards distribution, even though as you all know, the distribution segment of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry is been privatised, but we cannot fold our arms and allow them to continue not to do much in order to evacuate what the transmission can bring.
“But as it is now, even the transmission is not that strong. So, we need to put more investment into the transmission so that we can improve the willing capacity of the Transmission Company of Nigeria to be able to take up enough electricity from the generation.
“So, these memos, although 16 of them but they’re all geared towards achieving what I’ve just explained.”