As Serious As A Heart Attack!

Thursday, 01 September 2011 19:48

Written By Abraham Idowu


Just this week we learnt from Bart Nnaji, the power minister, that Nigeria would at long last be installing the last four turbines for Kainji hydro power station which was initially commissioned in 1968. Yep. After only four decades of operation Kainji would be finally getting its full design complement of turbines. We learnt too that the sixth turbine at the Egbin thermal power station, Nigeria’s power flagship, a role it took over from Kainji, will soon be repaired after years of being cannibalized to keep the other turbines working. The cost of ‘completing’ Kainji and fixing its other turbines is $82m while Egbin would become whole again for less than $10m (N1.5b). Maybe those pittance amounts explain why these first things have been left till last. Maybe having a professional like Nnaji in charge makes the difference. Or maybe we just haven’t been taking this whole powerlessness seriously enough.

Between returning to Nigeria from a near four year sojourn in Ghana in mid 2009 and the end of 2010 I expended about N5m in ensuring I had 24/7 power at home. That was the cost of a 17kva diesel generator, a 10kva inverter and a 7kva backup petrol generator plus fuel and servicing costs over less than 18 months. Power was my largest budget subhead. It beat food, education, rent, locomotion and everything else. It essentially made the difference between buying a house with a mortgage and renting. It was as serious as a heart attack for me.

Back in 2006 Ghana had a power ‘crisis’. I wrote ‘crisis’ because having your neighbourhood programmed for a power outage for 12 hours every two days wouldn’t be seen as a crisis in Nigeria. It was brought on by a multi year drought which reduced Akosombo dam water levels below safe operating levels at a time crude oil prices were ramping up to record levels (Ghana’s second most important power plant was the Takoradi thermal station which ran on liquid fuel) and VALCO’s (the aluminium smelter which was the biggest energy consumer in Ghana) restarting. A perfect storm one could say. Even though the government knew the rains would eventually come and that the West African Gas Pipeline which was then being built would bring relief with cheap gas, it still pulled out all the stops in dealing with what its Nigerian counterpart would have waved off as a temporary and minor glitch.

VALCO’s operation was stopped. Power supply to Togo was rationalized. At this time our Obasanjo volunteered to take up the burden of supplying power to Togo and ‘donating’ about 80MW to Ghana itself. Ghanaians have not stopped laughing since that joke. Ghana’s government also brought in a few million CFL bulbs (energy savers) which were given free of charge to Ghanaians to replace incandescent bulbs that were in use and effectively reduce demand by over 100MWs. Lastly the government published the power rationing schedule which changed every two weeks AND it published daily the vital statistics of the vital Akosombo dam!

Every day, at the top of the Daily Graphic was a small table detailing the water level the previous day, the minimum level the dam could operate at, the maximum level of water the dam could hold and the level of water the dam had same day the previous year. These data were used by laymen, experts and the opposition in vigorously debating the various issues surrounding the power crisis. The opposition of course accused the government of various shenanigans including restarting VALCO as a political gimmick despite the power supply challenges but no one could deny that it all helped in shaping policy including the eventual temporary mothballing of VALCO. That was a country that realized an energy crisis was as serious as a heart attack to the national economy.



Nigeria’s economy suffered an energy sector induced massive heart attack three decades ago and has been on life support since at incalculable cost to individual, commercial and government pockets. Somehow we have failed to give this potentially life threatening situation the attention it deserves. In the last 12 years we have of course given it enough budgetary attention but this has been without any sincerity or consistency. This is the only reason obvious, indeed blatant, low hanging fruit have been left hanging till date. Nnaji has made a good start with his moves on Kainji and Egbin but there are still too many easy opportunities lying around. I enumerate a few below:

Can Nnaji confirm that Kainji and other hydro power plants like Shiroro have been dredged since they were built? If they haven’t been how can the basins capture and retain the maximum amount of water? By the way this is probably a question we should be asking of the Ogun river basin authority that has recently acquired a habit of annual wanton destruction by releasing excess water from its dam. Two obvious questions come to my mind: Why does the river basin authority wait each year until the dam is threatened by collapse before releasing levels of water that create destruction downstream when it should have anticipated the inflow during the rainy season and released water ahead of the deluge? And why is this just a recent development? Could it be that the basin has lost much of its water holding capacity due to silting? In the last week the Eleyele Waterworks has been, hopefully falsely, accused of the same practice and being culpable in the flood that took about 100 lives in Ibadan. Conversely, as part of its water basin management efforts, the Volta River Authority (VRA), managers of the Akosombo dam, recently sold the trees that were drowned when the dam was first filled in the 1960s. Apart from the income made from harvesting the timber one can imagine the level of focus on dam management VRA has.

Can Nnaji tell us when Nigeria will start managing down power consumption via a government mandated switch from incandescent bulbs to Compact Flourescent Lights (CFL)? Virtually every nation on earth has a policy on this for efficiency and environmental reasons. I wrote a piece on this years ago and even managed to share it with one of the energy committees where it was reportedly well received but nothing has come from on high yet. Ghana not only reduced effective demand by over 100MWs through an investment of less than $10m in a few million CFLs but it gained a CFL factory at Tema in the process. Their bulbs are of such high quality that I use them in Nigeria in preference to the Chinese junk available in our market.

Can Nnaji tell us when we shall start being informed about how the little inadequate power we do produce is rationed? If I am only getting power 25% of the time it is crucial for me to know when to expect that fractional supply so that I can arrange my affairs accordingly. If I am a welder, tailor or similar artisan or even if I only have a small generator that cannot power my electrical iron, having such information would buffer me to an extent against the deleterious effects of our decades old deadly affliction. In addition can we get a weekly scorecard on all our capital power plants, say 100MW and above, both operational and under construction? We want to see in simple tabular form just what’s up with each and every one of them. In other lands it is called accountability. If more than half our capital investment is going into the power sector then we need to be kept abreast of what is being done with our money.

Can Nnaji tell us why we do not have an LNG receiving terminal at Egbin yet? While he is answering this he can tell us too what has delayed the second Escravos to Lagos gas line till date. I know with gas fields just hundreds of kilometers away from Egbin it makes most economic sense to pipe gas to the plant but since the hunters in the Western Niger Delta have learnt to shoot without missing shouldn’t Egbin learn to fly without perching? Shell and Chevron’s gas pipelines are vandalized several times annually with supply outages required once or more a year to fix the lines. For such a major component in our national power infrastructure we need a fallback. Such a fallback will even help the Koreans or whoever finally acquires Egbin to consider building capacity at Egbin to 5,000MW or thereabouts to meet a major part of the energy demand in the Lagos axis.

Can Nnaji tell us why the Ijora power station has lain fallow for so long? Shouldn’t this plant have been used as a pilot for the privatization process a long time ago just as we have with his, Nnaji’s, company’s dedicated supply to Abuja? I believe a private investor given the mandate could easily install anything up to 1,000MW of thermal turbines at Ijora dedicated to supplying Lagos Island, Victoria Island, Ikoyi and Lekki. This would be cherry picking some of the best customers in the land but it would also help prove that privatized power can be made to work in Nigeria and go a long way to make the rollout across the rest of the country possible. Of course a wise investor would put in place backup LNG supply and not only depend on just extending gas supply from Gaslink’s Ijora / Apapa loop.

I am sure there are a lot more bite sized ideas one could challenge Nnaji on but this essay got me out of bed at 3am and I truly trust the good Prof is, for once, a square peg in the Power minister square hole. He knows what all the issues are and hopefully has 1001 solutions up his sleeves. He must go round all power plants nationwide and not depend on reports sent to Abuja by the likes of the reportedly clueless erstwhile administrator of the Olorunshogo thermal plant. I am sure he has a lot more people in critical positions who might be better off pushing files in Abuja or pushing their grandkids’ prams back at home. In addition to rooting all such misfits out the minister must engage with the nation. A monthly parley with the national press wouldn’t be too much considering what is at stake. I wish him well in his job and hope that he will succeed in finally getting his patient out of the intensive care unit.

Abraham Idowu

biodunid04@yahoo.com

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