‘New roadmap for power sector should be target driven, expert urges FG
By Abisola THOMPSON
A power expert, Mr Kola Balogun, has urged the new ministers to setup a team of experts to create a performance driven criteria for the entire power sector value chains mostly especially the Discos
Balogun said there is need for the Federal Government through the Ministers to set a roadmap to address generation, distribution and transmission challenges in the power sector.
Balogun, who is the Chairman, Momas Electricity Meter Manufacturing Company (MEMMCOL) said this in an exclusive interview with TBI Africa team in Lagos that this became necessary to redirect the power sector to be more focused and business oriented.
He said the power sector was faced with various challenges, that had to do with lack of ownership of the entire power sector value chain.
He said in taking ownership, somebody must define a proper roadmap, to know the goals of the power sector reform.
Balogun, however, advised the new minister to be up and doing as well as surpass the strides taken in the sector by his predecessor.
Balogun urged him to bring his experience to bear with a view to continuing and surpassing the efforts the current administration had made in the power sector.
He advised the minister to ensure technical and commercial alignment of the value chains in the nation’s power sector.
He also urged the new minister to ensure cooperation and collaboration among the stakeholders ,with a view to ensuring the growth of the sector.
According to him, the minister should be in the forefront of promoting requisite peace and partnership in the sector in a way that operators would see Nigeria as an entity worth transacting business with.
“Specifically, the sector needs a principled and determined person who will take decisions against partisan interests, for growth of the sector.
“Minister should reactivate the independent power projects in the country, engage the power distribution and generation companies with a view to appraising those with the capacity to serve effectively in the areas of strength,” he said.
He also tasked the minister to ensure massive deployment of meters to all customers as well as use technology to monitor their customers to eliminate all manualisation of operations.
He advised the ministry to champion a road map that is target driven , to improve the sector.
He said :“ To my own observation, it is to ensure that power is made available to the general populace of Nigeria at a reasonable tariff.
“I don’t want a miss-merge, we need to enhance our infrastructure on the distribution value chain, generation is increasing tremendously.
“Federal government is trying to spend more money on transmission, the distribution network needs to be improved and we are providing a way forward to be able to improve distribution infrastructure by ensuring that all the substation and all technical and commercial losses are reduced significantly to barest minimum.
“In other to deliver power to the consumers, if you have meter in all customers premises and the network/ infrastructures cannot support to deliver power to the premises, it is a wasteful investment.
“What government needs to do is to call all stakeholders and look at the new road map of achieving optimisation in our power sector dream.
“We cannot solve the problem of Nigeria power sector by academy exercise, it is important that all the stakeholders has one thing in mind that look, our power sector must work we must have a reference cases where we can burst of success story.
“We need to start to create success stories by ensuring uninterrupted power supply. That should be the new next level agenda for government.”
The expert also urged the government to create a centralised data based system to indicate the volume of consumers in the network by the regulators.
” This is necessary to centralize one stock point where we can see all consumers of power sector, not the Disco giving regulators data,” he said.
He said that the regulators should have supervisory councils that will supervise the entire discos, which have the technology to do that.
“We need one single spot data base to monitor the entire discos effectively with their performance and it should be pluggable and done locally because we have the strength and manpower,” he said.
