The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, Omoyele Sowore, has decried the poor electricity generation in Nigeria, adding that the miserable 3000mgw of electricity the Gencos and Discos are currently managing would never engender development for global competition.
Sowore, stated this while featuring on Arise TV programme, The Morning Show, adding that if he was elected as president, he would tackle power generation by unbundling the power sector to allow individuals and companies to generate and sell power.
“But currently our system has broken down in terms of electricity. There is no way we can continue with miserable 3000mgw of electricity that the Gencos and Discos are managing.”
He said that Nigeria needed to elect leadership that would fix the country’s numerous problems in 2023; to create jobs for the youths that would turn around the economy.
He said, “There is nine billion cubic feet of gas in Ogoni land alone that can be tapped to also generate electricity. There is also potential for us to generate 4500mw of electricity out of northern Nigeria because of the preponderance of sunshine in that part of the world.
“There is also possibility for us to expand our hydro-electric generation capacity. There’s possibility for biogas if we use the droppings of cows; if we go into commercial ranching for instance and we keep all our 20 million cows in ranches across the country. Or not necessarily across the country whatever we can afford to place them.
“The droppings alone can generate over 1000mgw of electricity. We are just thinking progressively. It is not expensive and one other thing we need to do is break down the national grid. It is obsolete; it is no longer working for us and has isolated many grids across the country. So if you are generating from Kano, you supply Kano first and everybody can also get into the business of selling electricity.
It took Egypt less than two and a half years to generate 14,000MW at N500,000 per megawatt of power. Itâs the cheapest in the world. Here we can even do it cheaper because we have plenty of cheap labour; Iâm not saying weâre going to abuse labour. pic.twitter.com/D35jnKAepg— Omoyele Sowore (@YeleSowore) June 15, 2022
“Electricity that comes from say solar doesn’t have to come from the government alone, you can have your roof plastered with solar panels and you can sell to gencos, for example a disco whichever way they are described. But currently our system has broken down in terms of electricity. There is no way we can continue with miserable 3000mgw of electricity that the gencos and discos are managing. And there’s no way we can continue with our broken transmission system that is not taking us anywhere.
“So, I don’t want to discuss what we have currently, it’s not sufficient, it’s not going to serve the purpose we need and cannot use that to create a new economy that we are talking about that will generate over five million jobs that will bring about prosperity in this country and make us competitive even in the African subregion or sub-saharan African region.”
He had earlier tweeted in his Twitter handle @YeleSowore that “it took Egypt less than two and a half years to generate 14,000MW at N500,000 per megawatt of power. It’s the cheapest in the world.
“Here we can even do it cheaper because we have plenty of cheap labour; I’m not saying we’re going to abuse labour.
“And it’s the same Siemens who came to Nigeria to do the same thing and people were asking them for bribes that went to RASCOM, a state-owned power generating company in Egypt to do the same. This is public information. We need leadership; we don’t have it. That’s the problem. We need innovation. Assignment well-done!”
Credit: SaharaReporters