Electricity Crises: Ambivalent ownership, communal-goat scenario and acute blame-trading - Ik Muo

Electricity Crises:  Ambivalent ownership, communal-goat scenario and acute  blame-trading

Ik Muo, PhD, Department of Business Administration OOU, Ago-Iwoye . mouigbo@yahoo.com;muo.ik@oouagoiwoye.edu.ng; 08033026625

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It is said ( not by my people this time around) that nothing is settled until it is settled aright. I have been running my commentary on NEPA, PHCN and DISCOs for the past 38 years. The earliest I can remember was a poem( yes, I am a poet; I narrowly lost the Nobel Prize in Literature to Wole Soyinka) in which I regretted how NEPA made us to throw away our traditional sources of light and then disappointed us, thus leaving us,  ‘neither nor’. That was 1980/81. So, I want to suspend my commentaries on the DISCOs and their partners in crime. My focus has always been on the power distributors because they the ones ‘dealing’ with us.

 Power supply from the National grid averaged 3674 between 2015 to 2019. This miserable quantum was poorly managed in terms of distribution and customer services. Never mind that the former triple minister claimed early this year that power generation doubled within this period. Meanwhile, Amaechi, whose self-imposed job description was to oust Nwike( That is his name, not Wike) by all means, assured us in September 2018 that if we returned PMB to power, we would have 24-hour power supply. INEC announced in February this year that Nigerians returned PMB to Power; that was 5 months ago! So, what are we waiting for?. Our VP recently informed that this government has invested N900bn on power in the past 4 years and  was on the verge of investing another N600bn. So, if I borrow the phrase from is principal, where is the power? And just the other day,  the MD of TCN openly declared that  PHCN assets were ‘sold to investors that lacked capacity for long term investments’ a situation which created serious liquidity strain in the power market. He then assured, on our behalf that TCN was willing to write off the N270bn owed by the DISCOS to other stakeholders, so as to salvage the sector. Meanwhile, the 2019 capital budget for education is N47bn! I have finished this article when I heard that the FGN has signed a power roadmap agreement with Siemens and that the president has promised 11000 megawats by 2023. This is hardly enough but…I am waiting and watching

 So one of the problems with the power sector is ownership ambivalence. The government privatized power, held back some aspects of it and maintains an incestuous relationship with  a business it had privatized. Another problem is acute blame-trading. Discos blame TCN; TCN blames Gencos; Gencos blame the FG and in effect everybody is blaming everybody else. Finally our people say that if everybody goes to his/her mothers place, there would be nobody at home and that a goat owned by the community would die of hunger since everybody would assume that the other people would have fed it. Every player in the electricity market blames everybody else, and because the power sector is owned by a community of ravenous wolves, who invested in what they did not understand, we the customers become the pawns in the chase game. Just like Sunny Okosuns asked years ago, we must decide who owns this power sector: government or private sector? If it is government, let it be  and if it is the private sector, let it be. But whoever owns it in deed must offer services and be punished for defrauding the customers.  Metering is the minimum condition and the rule on customer disconnection MUST be applied. Customers who defraud the power sector operators, should also pay the price( I am leaving the discos et al for now; I shall return in the next 10 years!)

Meanwhile, I have been generating, transmitting and distributing my own light for the past 25 years.( Muo & Muo Holdings: TRANSCO, GENCO & DISCO Unlimited ). If these new operators find things very difficult, let them consult me. In the national interest, I assure them that my charges will be moderate!

Other matters: Shiites; an avoidable conflagration

In this business of minding other peoples business, there are developments that are surprisingly very difficult to unravel. I am neither a security expert( and there 1001 of them all over the place, with some of them saying very elementary things) nor a Muslim scholar( and such I don’t know much of the doctrinal differences between the various aggregation of Muslim congregants). In 2015, the major security threat in Nigeria was the B’Haram and never mind all the declarations to the contrary, they are still there. However, for whatever reason( and I agree I don’t have all the information) the government raised Kanu and IPOBians to the status of National Ememy1. Everything was thrown into the war against IPOB,( a group that carry flags, chant songs and undertake their own version of evangelism) including a laughable classification as a terrorist group, which was affirmed by the courts, probably on technical grounds. Suddenly, just suddenly, the herdsmen who are no longer Fulani’s and who are even foreigners established their own deadly presence, wiping out communities, destroying farms and killing freely and effortlessly. Then, another group emerged, called, well, bandits. They have several operational similarities with BH-spreading blood, sorrow and tears through mass murder and scorched earth policy. While the invasion of communities by herdsmen is described as herders-farmers clashes, the same activity by the bandits are called attacks and at times invasion. And then, sometimes ago, the Shiites reportedly blocked the convoy of the Chief of Army Staff and the rest is history. The issue of concern to friends and foes is that the courts,  have ordered the government to release their leader, just as it declared IPOB a terrorist organization. But the Government that obeyed the IPOB criminalization has refused the release El-Zakzakky( since 2016) and now his people are furious. The securities  forces have been called in but what difference does it make when a person who wants to commit suicide sees somebody who wants to commit murder? From my little knowledge of strategy, I believe that the government has to carefully choose the wars it wants to fight and fighting several wars in several fronts simultaneously is never the best. And luckily for government, the courts have ruled. Let the government obey the court order and also ensure that the Shiites comply with the laws of the land. That is a win-win situation.